With our 18.2 Release Party fast approaching, Friday May 18th at  Wix Lounge SF, it is important for us to announce the gracious donators of our raffle.

Raffle tickets go on sale the night of the event and will be available for $2 each or $5 for three.

Trader Joe's Grab Bag - $60 value

Bringing back the party lore of the grab bag. Take this menagerie of goodies home and see what surprises you pull out to ease the any-time munchies. Assorted candies, trail mixes, snacks, etc.



Hand Made Black Sheep Crochet Hat by Sarah Caroline Design - $45 value

Defend yourself against the San Francisco cool while letting others know that you're not a run of the mill sheep with this Animal Farm favorite. Sarah Caroline Design is out of Oakland's Smart Loft Studio.

Selection of Duct Tape Roses by Lindsey Jo - $35 value

Write an inspired love poem or an ode to a grocery list with this rose shaped writing utensil. A trio of handmade duct tape roses, which are also writing pens, packaged as a decorative bouquet. 

Yoga - 1 month - $99 value

Stretch your horizons with a month of free yoga. One month free yoga at Funky Door.

Arrested Development Paper Doll Set - $60 value

Play along with the television show with your own set of 2 dimensional characters.

Cafe Royale - $25 Value

Sip on some wine, play some pool, and eat a Rock Island Panini at this fine Post Street establishment.

800 Post Street
San Francisco, CA

The Brow Lounge- $30 value

Once again, our supporter, The Brow Lounge, has donated a $30 gift certificate good for eye enhancements and facial hair removal in a friendly, clean environment with expert technicians. Walk-ins as well as appointments are possible. 

5916 College Ave
(between Chabot Road & Harwood Avenues several blocks north of Rockridge BART Station)

Oakland, CA 94618
(510) 428-9888

Vitalogy Chiropractic Services - $185 value

A gift certificate for an evaluation and two treatments, a total value of $185.
Highly recommended as a gentle and thorough chiropractor.

Darran J. Hamm D.C.
Vitalogy Chiropractic
1050 Marina Village Pkwy.
Ste 104
                              Alameda, CA
                             (510) 207.5565

Diesel Books - $20 value

Get that brain fuel and Diesel books. Stores in Oakland, Malibu and Brentwoood. The Oakland branch in the Rockridge neighborhood at 5433 College Ave
faithfully displays the latest issue of Fourteen Hills, and sponsors a number of readings by your favorite authors monthly.

Rockridge (510) 653-9965

Learn to Climb at Touchstone Gyms- $60 value

Get high on climbing at Touchstone. Prize includes two "Intro to Climbing" packages, including the training class, rental gear, and day passes to stay and climb after the class.

MISSION CLIFFS
2295 Harrison Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 550-0515
 

Assorted Fresh and Easy Chocolates from G.Debbas Chocolatier - $25 value

Now all you need to do is light the fire and throw on some Wayne Newton to set the mood. Enjoy $25 of assorted Fresh and Easy Chocolates hand-crafted by G.Debbas Chocolatier. These gourmet chocolates are superior in flavor and quality and are created using all-natural ingredients with no preservatives and no compromises. A special blend of cacao beans is carefully formulated to achieve a smooth, rich flavor that can only be found in multi-award winning G.Debbas chocolates!

Cafe Yesterday - Two $25 gift certificates

Drink the coffee of yesterday today! A locally owned cafe in Berkeley, they've been around for just about two years. Great coffee, fairly large breakfast and lunch menu (their sandwiches are really good), friendly staff, beer and wine too! Plus, they've usually got some sort of event going on once a week, their newest addition being a stand-up comedy night every Friday.

Mission Cheese - $35 value

$35 to Mission Cheese, located at 18th and Valencia and a mere two blocks from the 16th and Mission Bart station. Mission Cheese serves fabulous cheeses, of course, and also sandwiches, meats, wine, beer, and chocolate.

Mission Pie - One Pie $20 value

Indulge in an American classic with a pie and a cup o' Joe.
Gift certificate for one pie from Mission Pie at the corner of Mission and 25th. A cafe-bakery with sweet and savory pies made from wholesome foods. A fun, upbeat place to hang out.

2901 Mission Street,
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 282-1500

Pam Benjamin’s Voices and $20 Gift Certificate to Bird and Beckett

Feel lucky if you win this prize because you'll get to go to Bird and Beckett books without having to wonder whether they carry Pam Benjamin's Voices, since you'll already own a copy!

Bird and Beckett- $20 gift certifcate 

653 Chenery Street,
San Francisco, CA 94131
(415) 586-3733

Pam Benjamin's Voices:

If Grant doesn't listen to the Voices, bad things happen to good people and bad people, and dogs and rodents and cafeteria trays. With the help of his mental roommate, who only speaks in musical quotes, and his Voices, Grant plans to escape "Horizon Dawn" to save his daughter from his ex-wife's new psycho boyfriend.

Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Presents Flush Fiction - $16.95 value
An anthology of literature that’s just the right size for those visits to the, uh, privatarium. Funny, smart, thought-provoking, but, most of all, short. Autographed by Fourteen Hills staff member and Uncle John’s contributor John Haggerty, making it simultaneously much rarer and much less valuable.

Autographed Books from Maxine Chernoff - $80 value

Four autographed books donated for a summer reading package by the iconic poet Maxine Chernoff.

Can't wait to see you all there!

Link to more 18.2 event information

Link to RSVP on Facebook

If you haven’t had the pleasure of reading Melinda's work, you can start with "All the Small Objects" published in issue 14.2 (Spring 2008).

Most recently, the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University awarded her the Mary MacKall Gwinn Hodder Fellowship for the 2012-13 academic year. Her debut collection, Bear Down Bear North: Alaska Stories, won the Flannery O' Connor Award in Short Fiction and the UC Davis Maurice Prize in Fiction. Her stories have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Conjunctions, Cimarron Review, American Short Fiction, and many others. She was also named one of the 2011 writers “5 Under 35” by the National Book Foundation.

Congratulations Melinda on all of your successes!

Staff and Editors
Fourteen Hills

Written by Ari Moskowitz
Assistant Fiction Editor

Here at Fourteen Hills, we are accustomed to things changing: new staff members coming onboard, new writers being discovered, and each issue published becoming a different capsule of the semester that was spent preparing for it. But some things always stay the same, and I’d like to think our general aesthetic is one of those things. For years and years, one of our favorite quotes to consider has been the following passage from actor and director extraordinaire, Constantin Stanislavski:

We love writing that is able to balance darkness with lightness, bleakness with hopefulness, and that is ultimately rich with contrast. Therefore, it’s no surprise we are incredibly excited to learn that Melanie Rae Thon will be reading at the 4th Annual Gina Berriault Award Reading on Wednesday, May2nd at 7:00 pm in the Poetry Center (Humanities Building, room 512). Thon is an author who perfectly embodies the Stanislavski quote in her writing. She is not afraid of depicting violent or hurt characters who stab, rape, murder and steal, but she balances out these gritty portrayals by imbuing her characters with the ability to make tender professions of love and to connect with others in beautiful, unexpected ways.

The author of four novels, including Voice of the River and Sweet Hearts, Melanie has been published in Best American Short Stories (1995, 1996), Pushcart Prize Anthologies (2003, 2006, 2008), and O. Henry Prize Stories (2006), among many others. She is the winner of a Whiting Writer’s Award, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Writer’s Residency from the Lannan Foundation, and a fellowship from the Tanner Humanities Center. Melanie Rae Thon is also a dedicated professor in the Creative Writing and Environmental Humanities programs at the University of Utah, where she divides readings for her students between “science, spiritual texts, and literature.”

Her most recent novel, The Voice of the River, is a triumphant tapestry woven from multiple viewpoints. Each character, from a small homeless child to a baker from prison, is a “survivor,” one of a community of people who have loved and lost, and whose thoughts merge together to whirl around the sudden disappearance of a young boy and his dog.  In this novel and in all of her work, Melanie Rae Thon is not afraid to explore the bleaker side of existence. However, she is also not afraid to show us there is always love and hope, and the world itself will never stop being filled with a beauty so resplendent that it inspires near-spiritual contemplation.

Walking into Adobe Bookshop last Monday morning, I was immediately struck by two distinct sounds: the soft lull of an old Billie Holiday record and the short snaps of a typewriter. This shop doesn’t feel like a store, it feels like home. Bookshelves canvas every vertical surface, showcasing their amazing amount of books. Overflowing stacks line the aisles. Big, comfy couches serve avid readers and sleepy wanderers alike. The names of famous authors painted on the walls lead book foragers to an art gallery in the back. And most appealingly, this place smells like books. That might seem too obvious to mention, but in a world dominated by the alienation of online shopping, I cannot express how refreshing it is to walk into an actual bookstore and breathe in the scent of old knowledge, to run my hands across yellowing pages, and browse Adobe’s stacks without the constraints of a search engine.

14H:  Would you say that there is an overall theme to the books you carry here?

Photo credit to Elayna Yussen 

Rae Gouirand’s first book, Open Winter, has garnered a remarkable amount of acclaim. The collection, one of whose poems, “Firewood,” is featured in Fourteen Hills 17.2., won the 2011Bellday Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Four Way Books Levis Prize, the Fordham University Press Poets Out Loud Prize, and  many others. Currently, it is up for the Audre Lorde Award, a California Book Award, and the Montaigne Medal.

It is no wonder this superbly organized volume with four sections of fifteen poems each has earned such attention. Gouirand’s cool, keen eye takes us into the winter dimensions of our vision and emotion, as if looking through a crack in the board fence around our backyard: the nearness of snow, the distance of “lapis galaxies.” Right from the first poem, “By Infinity,” we examine what “pulls at the eye” and the paradox of existence, that “thread between presence and absence.” Throughout this generous volume, we continue to find permutations of other lines and dots, those points that “measure our particular instance” (“Low Stars”).

RG: The poems in Open Winter were written over a period of about ten years and represent a fairly wide spectrum of concerns I have in verse—concerns about narrative and the narrative I, concerns about the poetic line and about what that tradition represents, concerns about space (literal/thematic, within the line, within the poem, within the human heart and mind), concerns about never and always (as in the title poem and the collection’s overarching concern with winter—an open winter is actually a winter with no snow, a season marked by a lack of signs). And of course the concern that seems to unite all poets—the limits of what is sayable. That one never dies.

What draws me to essay is what draws me to love. Its potential to educate, to awaken and deepen inquiry, its capacity to challenge, the space it grants story and relationship and realization. Its power to help us remember our relationships to one another as participants in a human conversation, and its thank-god insistence (when the essaying is good) on engagement. I am thrilled to be alive and writing at a time when so many gifted writers from so many seemingly distinct traditions are discovering the essay and moving some of their work into its deeply investigative territory. Talk about territory and kinship. The entire last year of my life has been about prose, about taking up the work of finding a story form that can support my own narrative. I’m learning what it’s like to commit to poetics on an entirely new level. It’s the steepest reckoning I’ve ever undertaken. Forgive me if I sound abstract here, but it’s huge. Like working with everything.

We at Fourteen Hills couldn't be more excited about the upcoming Gina Berriault Award Ceremony, where this year's recipient Melanie Rae Thon will read from some of her latest work. Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012, at 7 p.m. in San Francisco State University's historic Poetry Center.

Thon's most recent release is the novel The Voice of the River (Fiction Collective 2, 2011). She is also the author of the novels, Sweet Hearts  (Washington Square Press, 1998), Meteors in August (Faber & Faber, 1992), and Iona Moon (Plume, 1995), as well as the short story collections In This Light: New and Selected Stories (Graywolf Press, 2011), First, Body (HOLT, HENRY * & CO , 1998)  and Girls in the Grass (Owl Books/Henry Holt , 1998).  

To get a taste of some of Thon’s writing insights, check out the following snippet from an interview with Aaron Cance at Fiction Writers Review:

"My own writing grows more spare, more elliptical all the time, closer, I hope, to the music of poetry. At seventeen weeks, the ears of the human fetus are open, ready to receive, exquisitely developed. We awaken in a waterworld, immersed in vibration and sound: the unceasing whoosh of blood through the uterine artery, our mother’s heart and breath, the surprising syncopation of our own miraculous heartbeat. We know the exaltation and pitch of voice: anger, fear, love, sorrow. Language to us is a polyphonic murmuration. We speak not only mind to mind, but body to body. Until each sentence sings, my work is unfinished. I read every line aloud—twenty, thirty, a hundred times—seeking not only sense, but tone and timbre and rhythm, hoping that through the fusion of meaning and music my words can touch anyone, fetus or mother."

Please RSVP through our Facebook Event page.

Be sure to check out the Fourteen Hills fall issue release of 19.1 for our exclusive interview with Ms. Thon!

Chance Kroll

Fiction Staff

We at Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review are proud to announce that Frederic Tuten, icon of American literature and well-known art critic, will be the Judge of the 2012 Michael Rubin Book Award in Fiction.

Born in 1936 in the Bronx, Mr. Tuten had a rough and tumble childhood, and by the age of 16 he had dropped out of High School to pursue a life as a painter in Paris. Returning to America, he received his undergraduate degree from City College of New York, studied art history at National Autonomous University of Mexico, got his Ph.D. in 19th century American literature from New York University, and spent 15 years as the head of the Graduate Program for Creative Writing at City College of New York.

The author of five books of fiction, numerous short stories, and many essays on art, writing, and film, his novels include The Adventures of Mao on the Long March (Citidal Press, 1971), Tallien: A Brief Romance (Black Classic Press, 1988), Tintin in the New World: A Romance (Black Classic Press, 1993), Van Gogh’s Bad Cafe (Black Classic Press, 1997), and The Green Hour (W. W. Norton & Company, 2002). His short fiction has appeared in Conjuctions, Fence, Fiction, Granta, The New Review of Literature, and Tri-Quarterly. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing in 1973, and the Award for Distinguished Writing from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001. His most recent work is a collection of interrelated short stories called Self Portraits: Fictions (2010).

Mr. Tuten seems torn between art and literature, saying, “What is more beautiful, words or images? I don’t have an answer”. In an interview with the website Book Forum, he goes on to say, “Roy [Roy Lichtenstein cover artist of several of Mr. Tuten’s novels] once said to me, when an artist goes to make a painting, he or she already has in mind what a work of art should look like. And that, he said was the problem. It is the same problem for writers when they start a novel or a story. Hence, we produce the same novels and stories. Roy was a seeker, an original, and his work inspired me to approach my writing with questions.”

Here is a program of Frederic Tuten reading from Self Portraits: Fictions at The New York Public Library, followed by an interview.

For the last twenty years, Dog Eared Books has made its home among the bars, taquerias, thrift stores, and various quirky knick-knack shops on Valencia Street adding to the surrounding vibrant, cultural neighborhood.

Just as the name suggests, Dog Eared Books carries a fantastically eclectic range of new and used books, literary journals and magazines. The overall feel that this store is able to pull off, cozy and warm even if it’s pouring rain outside, is something to marvel at. With their tall reaching shelves packed to the brim with stacks of books and pretty much all the literary journals and zines choices you could want, along with their friendly staff it’s easy to see why Dog Eared has such strong ties with their community: it’s a book lover’s heaven.

Gina Ochsner was already a star when we published her story "A Falling Porcupine" (12.2, Spring 2006), and her career has continued to flourish.

Ochsner’s first collection of stories, People I Wanted to Be, won the Oregon Book Award in 2005, and in 2009 her second collection The Necessary Grace to Fall, was the recipient of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Met with great acclaim, her first novel, The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight (Portobello Books, London, 2010), and her short stories have been published in such journals as The New Yorker, Glimmer Train, and The Kenyon Review.
       
Now teaching at Seattle Pacific Low Residency MFA Program, you can find even more information about Gina Ochsner’s other publications here.

Jacob Wyley

Fourteen Hills Intern

Since Fourteen Hills featured Bob Hicok’s poems “The gospel according to a weather vane,” “Trying to stay in shape,” and “Substance” (14.1, Fall 2007), his subsequent works have garnered continued success. Several of his poems have appeared in The New Yorker, his latest was in their March 19th, 2012 issue. The Best American Poetry Series has selected Bob’s work four times, most recently in 2008 and 2009. Winner of three Pushcart Prizes, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two NEA Fellowships, his collection This Clumsy Living also snagged The 2008 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry.

 His most recent book, Words for Empty and Words for Full, is available from the University of Pittsburgh Press.