Thursday, Oct. 4, 2007 through Saturday, Oct 6, 2007  

The Santa Fe Short Story Festival is a three-day celebration of the importance of short fiction in the cultural life of community.

While the Festival is now in its third year, the written story is born of ancient oral traditions in which traveling storytellers and bards kept memory, history, tragedy, and laughter alive. Stories wrestle with the intimate details of the human condition, tell how we live, and remind us who we are --- good, bad, and ugly.   During the Festival, writers of many ages and backgrounds meet, exchange ideas, and share stories.  Sparks of inspiration fly. Visiting writers of literary distinction add to the alchemy.  This year writers include H.G. Carrillo, Eddie Chuculate, LeAnne Howe, Ron Rash, Manuel Muñoz, and Joan Silber. Prizewinners all! Laura Furman, writer and series editor of the O’Henry Prize Stories (Anchor Books), moderates panels. The series publishes twenty stories a year.

See the Calendar of Events beginning in Santa Fe, New Mexico on Thursday, Oct. 4, 2007 and running through Saturday Oct. 6, 2007.  All events take place on the beautiful campus of the New Mexico School for the Deaf at 1060 Cerrillos Rd., which was built in the 1930s with lawns, gardens, patios, ramadas and a wonderful theater.

 

The New Mexico School for the Deaf was founded in 1885 and provides comprehensive and accessible educational and support services to Deaf and Hard of Hearing children and youth between the ages of birth to 22 from all over the state of New Mexico.  To learn more about NMSD visit www.nmsd.k12.nm.us

 

 

Notes from our Artistic Director:

The SANTA FE SHORT STORY FESTIVAL is committed to fortifying culture to build community.
 
The festival is a gathering place – a place of ideas, stories, images, reflection and dialogue – a place of culture. It is a place of excellence, abundance, generosity and delight.

A lively festival brings together a community with its sleeves rolled up – strength in its hands.  The festival fosters and nourishes an ingenious, funny, competent, resilient, powerful, ready, open, and roomy community. It works within that community to make art, to tell the stories that need telling, and to build a celebratory culture. Culture is not something we possess or purchase  – it is something we make.

We live in a time of mass culture - a culture of technology not people. Culture industries make products that can be endlessly replicated, easily distributed and profitably marketed. Often established cultural institutions, big and little, produce and disseminate a parallel culture of status, reinforcing the myth of meritocracy: that with sufficient concentration of capital and experts, they will deliver “the best” to the culture-consumers, who will in turn benefit from proximity to the best.

The message of mass culture is that the accumulation of wealth is the highest possible goal, and that most of us should simply yield to “experts.” These cultural systems are prescriptive - they tell us how we ought to behave; how to interpret our roles and responsibilities as members of civil society. They outline our stories and our collective histories. They suggest that an elite few should be empowered to choose which stories and which storytellers will be heard … and which forms will be used in the telling. They silence our unique voices.

A lively festival, in the heart of community, fosters true cultural democracy ... no stories left untold, no lives uncelebrated!

YOUNG WRITERS

The SANTA FE SHORT STORY FESTIVAL is committed to working with young writers. We offer demanding artistic challenges and support young creators in building the confidence that assures their full participation in the community’s cultural life.

Young writers find their fullest expression when encouraged to wrestle with their place in the scheme of things. Their work is not served by isolation or “specialness.” To write is to take one’s place in the life of a people – to be powerful, ready, open, roomy.

Young writers hunger for deep life-giving experiences. They need to work with others to make things, to build culture, to celebrate.

Young writers help us to focus on some few elemental ideas that shape the world; they test their strength against human need and potentiality; grow a rich and resolute inwardness.

Young writers bring extraordinary gifts to their community – they reaffirm and renew essential human covenants and revere nature; they balance wonder and discontent in the struggle to transform themselves and their world.

Director Bio:

David Matthew Olson is the Artistic Director of the SANTA FE SHORT STORY FESTIVAL has a history of bringing words to life. He is the founding Artistic Director of THEATERWORK, a not-for-profit theatre company in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 1966, Olson founded El Teatro Laboratorio de Bogotá in Columbia, a company he directed until 1972. In 1978 he founded Cherry Creek Theater in Saint Peter, Minnesota and remained its Artistic Ddirector until 1989. He also edited Theaterwork Magazine, an internationally distributed bi-monthly publication covering progressive theater companies around the world. In the United States, Olson has been a long-term advocate for the development of cultural projects as community building.

What The Critics Say About This Year's Writers

H.G. CARRILLO

“His literary ancestors are the fabulous Latins with their reverence for myth and for memory, their penchant for surrealism: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende…When Carrillo constructs a Cuba that exists only in words, he and his fictive island coexist in what Henry James called ‘a rare state of the imagination’. For a young writer that’s a good place to be.”
- Washington Post Book World

EDDIE CHUCULATE:
Ursula K. LeGuin on Galveston Bay, 1826 by Eddie Chuculate:
 
    "Galveston Bay, 1826" won me first, and last, but surprising me: every sentence unexpected, yet infallible. On rereading, both qualities remain.
        Where are among these coyote mirages, this endless herd of antelope? What is this beautiful place? Is it the land of magical realism? Not exactly. It's a bit north of that. It's never home. It's the way things were and aren't. ...
        The tone of the narration is serene and buoyant, a rare mood at present and one that might lead the reader, thinking it accidental, to underestimate the weight and strength of the piece....
        The calm, beautiful, unexplaining accuracy of description carries us right through the madness of the final adventure. "Three arrows pointing upward floated past Old Bull at eye level, followed by a limp swamp rat and Red Moon's appaloosa, upside down". And so the survivor of journey and cataclysm comes home, alone, to tell his tale - perhaps, as an old hero, to embellish it a little. The ultimate aim of the short story. like the arrow, is to end exactly where it should. In art, the satisfaction of hitting the bull's eye is not a simple one. It goes deep.
 

“ A linguistic wizard, Carrillo creates…a syncopated, jazzy rhythm…its sentences twist and turn, first embracing, then rejecting pure, uncontaminated English and Spanish...”
-    Los Angeles Times

LAURA FURMAN

"Beneath the beautifully polished, quiet surfaces of Laura Furman's stories lie drama, terror, and startling bursts of recognition. Drinking with the Cook shows her doing what she does best: astutely tracking our lives, showing where we are and how inevitably we got there." 

-    Lynne Sharon Schwartz

"If any of us need proof that fiction tells the truth, we can find it in this collection...Furman's prose is so spare and matter-of-fact, so unpretentious and convincing, we are startled to find we are being led from the specific to the universal." 

-    Detroit Free Press

"In these stories, houses, sometimes even gardens, are fertile playing fields for subtle emotional rivalries. Furman draws these conflicts with empathy, even as she fills them with sharp, wry asides, only occasionally slipping into overdrive in her use of symbols. Throughout ''Drinking With the Cook,'' her provocative snapshots of the devious, sometimes years-long punishments people inflict on one another are so vivid they can be almost painful to read."

-    Deborah Mason, The New York Times Book Review

"On the dust jacket of ''Watch Time Fly'' is a Jacques Henri Lartigue photograph of a woman (her apron suggests a cook or housemaid) throwing a large ball into the air and waiting for it to come down into her arms. Against a dense background of well-manicured trees, bushes and grass, this woman - a ''civilized'' character in a tamed wilderness - is a perfectrepresentation of Miss Furman's fiction. The woman is suspended in time, waiting for an inevitable event (the ball's descent) that will nonetheless never occur in the world of this photo. Like Lartigue's photographic style, Miss Furman's facility with words turns the mundane into the slightly eerie, the cliche of common experience into the bizarrely particular tale. And like Lartigue, Miss Furman manages to combine apparent artlessness with a moving and very sophisticated esthetic sensibility."

-    Wendy Lesser, The New York Times Book Review


MANUEL MUÑOZ

“All of the stories…in The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue by Manuel Muñoz…are set within a single neighborhood on Fresno’s heavily Hispanic working-class outskirts, and their energy derives from the friction between the characters’ desires for love and acceptance, escape and permanence…Muñoz writes elegantly and sympathetically…his stories are far too rich to be classified under the rubrics of “gay” or “Chicano” fiction; they have a softly glowing. Melancholy beauty that transcends those categories and makes them universal.”
- Jeff Turrentine, The New York Times Book Review

“Sweet. Moody, sexy, cruel. Stories told with such tenderness, they leave you with your heart aching.”
- Sandra Cisneros

“ Muñoz has created a wholly authentic vision of contemporary California…one that has little to do with coastlines, cities or silicon…Muñoz’s Central Valley is a part of California – a part of America– That has yet to see many liberations: gay, women’s or economic… He is too truthful a writer to present false hope. Zigzagger is a book to read if you want to see another California…unfamiliar, but home to millions. It heralds the arrival of a gifted and sensitive writer.”

- David Ebershoff, Los Angeles Times Book Review

RON RASH

“Chemistry and Other Stories is a real winner. Each tale is painstakingly made and shows a deep understanding of the heart and character of Appalachia.”
- Tim Gatreaux, author of The Clearing

“ With Chemistry, Ron Rash assures himself a place among the greatest of Southern writers. I keep shaking my head at the raw and tragic beauty of these stories.”

 - Janisse Ray, author of Wild Card Quilt

“Extraordinary…powerful…charming…No matter the story, Ron Rash grabs you and doesn’t let go.”
- Kirkus Reviews    


JOAN SILBER

“Joan Silber’s Ideas of Heaven is luminous, stunning…The stories gather wholeness through deepening meditations on devotion…and through the startling use of language.”
- Laurie Stone, Chicago Tribune

“There are books whose pieces linked not by mere repetition of the protagonist but by genuine artfulness and imaginative necessity; Joan Silber’s splendid new Ideas of Heaven, for example, in which the smallest wisp of one story will, in the next, sometimes blaze to full, unexpected life.”
- Thomas Mallon, New York Times Book Review