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January 2012

International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam

Peter Rorvik on Film

[This is the second installment of an ongoing series written for the blog by Peter Rorvik. Peter is the Director of the Centre for Creative Arts at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, as well as Director of the Durban International Film Festival.]

Despite widespread funding cutbacks for culture coming from a Dutch government retreating into conservatism, the International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam of 2011 looked as strong as ever, entrenching wide acknowledgement that this is the worlds’ leading documentary festival.

For events of this size, IDFA scores big in respect of manageability. Eleven simultaneous screens run in the old and arty Tuchinski and the more modern de Munt cinema complex, just two minutes apart, creating a very accessible film feast in the Rembrandt Plein locale, where you can also find box office and registration facilities, filmmaker discussions and live TV talk shows.

Book Prize Celebration Next Week!

2012 Prairie Schooner Book Prize Celebration

Prairie Schooner and the University of Nebraska Press will be hosting a couple events on campus next week as part of the 2012 Prairie Schooner Book Prize Celebration. The guests of honor (and the entertainment!) feature three of our recent Book Prize winners. They are, Shane Book (2010 winner in poetry for Ceiling of Sticks), Greg Hrbek (2011 winner in fiction for Destroy All Monsters), and James Crews (2011 winner in poetry for The Book of What Stays).

The flyer at your right contains all the particulars, but, just for fun, here are the main events:

The Karen Brown Interview

(Interviewed by Theodore Wheeler.)
Karen Brown

Karen Brown received the 2011 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction for her book Little Sinners and Other Stories, which is forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press. Her first collection of short stories, Pins and Needles, received AWP’s Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction and, in 2007, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press. Her work has appeared twice in the PEN/O.

The Publicity Associate: Trey Moody

Prairie Schooner is pleased to announce its new Publicity Associate, Trey Moody!

Moody, a San Antonio native and third-year Ph.D. student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, earned a B.A. and M.F.A. from Texas State University-San Marcos, where he taught and served as Poetry Editor of Front Porch. The author of the chapbooks Climate Reply (New Michigan Press) and Once Was a Weather (Greying Ghost Press), Moody’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in Best New Poets 2009, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, Washington Square, and elsewhere. With Jeff Alessandrelli, he co-curates The Clean Part Reading Series in Lincoln.

As Publicity Associate, Moody will work with relevant media outlets to promote Prairie Schooner’s public events and web initiatives, ensuring that the journal’s cultural presence is felt locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally.

O'Donnell on Poetry Daily

Prairie Schooner Winter 2011

We're a little late announcing it here, but Mary O'Donnell's poem "Sea Life in St. Mark's Square" was just yesterday the featured poem on Poetry Daily. You can still find the piece, which is from our current issue, of course, at this link.

It is a great poem from a deserving poet, and one we're proud to have it recognized like this.

Doha Tribeca Film Festival

DOHA mosque near festival cinema

[Dear Readers, this is the first installment of an ongoing series written for the blog by Peter Rorvik. Further dispatches will soon include the International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam and the Dubai International Film Festival. Peter is the Director of the Centre for Creative Arts at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, as well as Director of the Durban International Film Festival.]

Dispatch 1: Doha Tribeca Film Festival (Oct 25-29, 2011)

by Peter Rorvik

From the Archives: "Swan's Home" by Mitch Wieland

"Swan's Home" originally appeared in the Fall 2008 issue of Prairie Schooner.
"Swan's Home" by Mitch Wieland

Swan's Home
For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draweth nigh unto the grave. -Psalm 88

The call comes at high noon, with the sun bright on the rocks and sage, not in the dark midnight hours like Ferrell Swan always expected. On her cell from his old Ohio home, his ex-wife Rilla asks if he's sitting down.

"You bet," Ferrell says, standing at the porch rail. He looks across the high desert country, knowing the news is about Levon, Rilla's child from her first marriage. Ferrell helped raise the boy preschool to high school, the most strife and turmoil ever seen. Though Levon's now thirty-one, not a whole lot has changed.

"What this time?" he says when she doesn't volunteer the words.

"He crashed his car."

"Bad?"