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This new Netflix miniseries about a woman growing up in a strict Hasidic Judaism sect in Brooklyn who flees her arranged marriage and cuts ties with the community is loosely based on Deborah Feldman’s 2012 memoir, Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots. The four-episode series is directed by Maria Schrader and stars Shira Haas, Amit Rahav, and Jeff Wilbusch.
Now that we are being asked to stay at home to help slow the spread of the coronavirus and adjusting to this new terrain, most literary events have been canceled or postponed. Knowing this, I thought maybe I shouldn’t be writing about literary festivals and conferences, but I wanted to add a little hope for the future and highlight some great events we can look forward to that take place in Houston. It has also been wonderful to see some events and conferences, like TeenBookCon, adjusting to the current state of things and finding ways to have virtual events via social media platforms. To wrap up this series of posts, I want to tell you all about Zine Fest Houston.
Zine Fest Houston has been around since 1993, first as a small gathering in a local park in Houston where zine creators came together to share their latest issues. Since then, they have grown each year but the annual festival has always been about DIY creations. This is a space for brilliant creators to showcase and share self-published works or small print runs of literary works. Everything presented, shared, and worked on is unique and unconventional and that is the main draw to the festival. According to their website, the event promotes “zines, mini-comics, and other forms of small press, alternative, underground, DIY media and art.” The registration is free and the event is for all ages. There are tables and tables of artists and zines, panels and talks, and even zine-making workshops.
I actually sighed in relief after thinking this would be another festival that had to be canceled and seeing that, as of their announcement on Twitter in early March, the event scheduled for November 7 is still a go! This year’s theme celebrates all things transit-related and the ways transportation has influenced Houston’s culture.
Zine Fest Houston has also just organized a “Cyber Mall: Texas Zinesters & Comic Creators Directory” as a community Google sheet to support those who have lost income and opportunities to sell at festivals and events. Keep up with their news on Twitter, @ZineFestHouston.
Lupe Mendez is the literary outreach coordinator for Poets & Writers in Houston. Contact him at [email protected] or on Twitter, @houstonpworg.“Poetry exists in a relationship so that it can speak to your interior life. That’s why I believe that reading is relationship.” In this 2019 5x15 Stories video, Edward Hirsch, whose latest collection Stranger by Night is out now from Knopf, speaks about the craft of writing poems and how “poetry exists to inspire the reader.”
The pandemic that has shuttered nearly two-thirds of Barnes & Noble’s stores presents an unexected opportunity.
“Poets & Writers is a great leveler of the playing field…[and] gives a beginning writer living in a small town the same access to information as a connected veteran living in Manhattan. Poets & Writers gave me, as a young writer, a crash course in the writing life, giving me access to the opportunities that changed my life.”
As scores of indie bookstores have shut their doors to the public and laid off staff, many continue to serve their customers via online orders and curbside pickup programs.
“Her odes to Inanna mark the first time an author writes using the pronoun ‘I,’ and the first time writing is used to explore deep, private emotions.” This animated TED-Ed lesson by Soraya Field Fiorio explores the writings of Enheduanna, a high priestess in ancient Mesopotamia who is widely considered the world’s first author and wrote forty-two hymns and three epic poems by the time of her exile.
The author of the novel The Prettiest Star shares an exercise to help you approach your manuscript from a new angle.
A horse trainer and author of a memoir, Half Broke, contemplates silence, distance, and the language of our bodies during a pandemic.
A writer and illustrator in Hong Kong contemplates the lack of social interaction during the coronavirus pandemic.
