In partnership with Boston’s Grub Street, we’re welcoming two new fellows to our writers residency in Downtown Las Vegas.
Fellows will spend a month in the vibrant heart of downtown Las Vegas, engaging with and becoming a part of the city’s thriving arts scene. The fellowship is designed to give talented writers and other creatives the space, time, and freedom to work on their long-form projects. Fellows live in a fully furnished apartment near Las Vegas’ literary hub, The Writer’s Block bookstore.
Special thanks again to the Woodside community, Amazon Literary Partnership, Submittable, the New York Public Library, and private donors for helping bring these fellowships to life.
KL Pereira, April 2018
KL Pereira's debut short story collection, A Dream Between Two Rivers: Stories of Liminality was published by Cutlass Press in September 2017, and her chapbook, Impossible Wolves, was published by Deathless Press in 2013. Pereira's fiction, poetry, and nonfiction appear in LampLight, The Drum, Shimmer, Innsmouth Free Press, Mythic Delirium, Jabberwocky, Bitch, and other publications. She's a member of the New England Horror Writers Association and has taught creative writing in high schools, domestic violence shelters, colleges and universities, and writing institutions throughout New England for over ten years. She's been awarded grants and fellowships from Vermont Studio Center and Writing Downtown. Find her online klpereira.com.
About her project:
My month at The Writer’s Block will be an immersive experience in connecting with the literary community and working on my novel, Becoming Alien. This epistolary novel (complied of pages from diaries, zines, cassette liner notes, newspaper articles and other documentary ephemera) is told from the point of view of a teenage girl in the early 1990s, who, with her twin sister, migrates with a coyote to the United States from Mexico City after the death of their mother. The twins make their way to an unnamed metro area in the western United States to live with their white, American grandmother, the mother of the father they never knew. Abuela, as she known in the story, lives in constant fear of her grandchildren being exposed as “aliens” and constantly pushes a white identity on them. While one twin spends a lot of time hiding her undocumented status from neighbors and school mates, trying hard to assimilate into an “American” identity, the protagonist becomes obsessed with, and then begins to identify as, the mythological creatures she sees on a popular weekly television show, all of whom are never quite proved real, yet whose stories seem to live on despite the shadowy fear of being discovered. This novel is her testament to what it is like to push against shifting identities and ideologies while retaining a sense of self.
Ethan Gilsdorf, MArch 2018
Ethan Gilsdorf is an American writer, poet, performer, editor, critic, teacher, journalist, and author of "Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms" (The Lyons Press). Gilsdorf began his writing career in the 1990s as a poet and fiction writer, publishing in literary magazines such as Poetry, The Southern Review, The Quarterly, Exquisite Corpse, The North American Review, The Massachusetts Review and in several anthologies. He is also the winner of the Hobblestock Peace Poetry Competition and the Esme Bradberry Contemporary Poets Prize. He began writing nonfiction in 2000 as a Paris-based freelance journalist. He now writes about arts, culture, media and technology, and reviews books and films, for such publications as the New York Times, Boston Globe, Wired, and Salon. He also works as a writing instructor and consultant for GrubStreet, where is on the board of directors and where he co-founded GrubStreet's Young Adult Writers Program. He's been awarded residencies from the Millay Colony for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center; and grants from the Somerville Arts Council and Vermont Arts Council. More info at ethangilsdorf.com and Twitter @ethanfreak.
About his project:
A book-length memoir based on my article “The Day My Mother Became a Stranger,” published in 2015 in Boston Magazine, and named a “Notable” essay in the 2016 Best American Essays anthology.
Tentatively titled “Wild Kingdom: A Mother, a Son and a Catastrophic Brain Injury,” my memoir concerns my mother’s tragic story --- at age 38, Sara Gilsdorf was stricken down by a mind- and body-crippling brain aneurysm. The book is an effort to finally fathom the aftershocks, both physiological and emotional, of what befell her, and me. The memoir is my effort to make sense of what happened when her “brain exploded,” reclaim her lost life, and finally reckon with her legacy in my life. My exploration into this wrenching medical and personal story reveals not only my own torn and troubled relationship with her, but also how those wounds might be transformed and, in some way, redeemed.
Individual fellowships are made possible with support from the Amazon Literary Partnership, Submittable, the New York Public Library’s digital short story collection, and private donors. If your organization would like to partner with Plympton to sponsor a fellowship, please reach out to writingdowntown @ plympton.com.
To find out even more, visit http://www.writingdowntown.com
Update: Sadly, KL Pereira was unable to join us for the Writers Residency in Las Vegas due to unforeseen conflicts in scheduling. We wish her all the best!