Category: books

We are thrilled to announce the winner of our second book contest, The Sacred Text of Rosa Who Is Great, written by Marcus Lund and illustrated by Stella Peach!

An allegory told as legend through the voices of a town like yours and mine, The Sacred Text of Rosa Who is Great is a mini-epic of a seemingly normal person who only wants to be left alone, as understood by the community who didn’t understand her (some say him) while she was actually around. It was told across social media over the month of August, and will be the third in our series of Quiet Lightning Books.

 

Like Zack Haber’s if you want to be one of them playing in the streets… and Tupelo Hassman’s Breast Milk, which we published this year, we are printing this book with Tiny Splendor and will have a big release party sometime next year.

Thanks to everyone who submitted and made this hard on me and Sarah Ciston, the two judges of this contest. We will open up submissions to our third book contest on the night we launch The Sacred Text of Rosa Who is Great, and will keep you in the loop as things develop. Congratulations to Marcus and Stella!

 

Five Year Anniversary

We’re accepting submissions to the kickoff to our monthlong celebration of our 5-year anniversary; the show is on December 4th at The Emerald Tablet, and subs are open through the end of Wednesday, November 19th. Click here to submit.

We’ve got so much going on it’s hard to talk about. Quiet Lightning is changing. When the dust settles on 2014 we’ll have produced 69 shows featuring over 800 readings by 450 different people. We’ve done it in the road, in a cave, in a mansion, in a bar. We’ll have published 60 issues of sPARKLE & bLINK in 60 months, featuring cover art by more than 50 different local visual artists. And we’ll have our first full gallery exhibition of some of their work, kicking off a yearlong ekphrastic project.

As we set out to publish our third wonderful book, the first issue of our new magazine, vitriol, and our first full-length book (more soon), and gear up for the production of our second film, we want to thank everyone who has believed in Quiet Lightning for 30 minutes or for 30 months alike. From the volunteers to the staff to fledgling authors who braved a roomful of people for the first time to veteran authors who decided to send their work in to us, there has not been a single month or a single show gone by since December of 2009 that strangers and new friends alike have not surprised and delighted us.

Plenty of you have said incredible things about our times together; to quote one: “Not an event. A moment.” Here’s to making more of them together. We hope you can join us on December 4 for a literary mixtape, on the 5th for our artist reception, and for our year-ender on December 14th, the actual date of our anniversary and the vitriol launch.

We also want to thank the Zellerbach Family Foundation, Lagunitas Brewing Company, and the Leslie Scalapino O Books Fund for their continued support of Quiet Lightning. With their help we have been able to produce consistent shows and publications, to collaborate with more than two dozen likeminded organizations and countless local businesses of all kinds, and we have been able to sustain a prolonged period of impressive growth that finds us more excited about what we’re doing than ever before.

What a wonderful year, and five years, it’s been!

Thanks for everything. We’d love to have you get involved any way you’d like. In the meanwhile, enjoy watching and reading our recent gem of a show at Viracocha, below.

Sincerely,
Evan Karp
for Quiet Lightning

sPARKLE & bLINK 59 from Quiet Lightning

At the end of August we announced our first book contest: hand-write original work into a QL pocket notebook and hand it in before Halloween. We are proud to announce two winners: Zack Haber and Tupelo Hassman both convinced us to publish their excellent books, which will be released at a special show in April; both authors will read and have the opportunity to curate the rest of the evening.

Zack’s if you want to be one of them playing in the streets… is a collection of poems as playful as it is profound, and Tupelo’s fantasy, Breast Milk, which was “written solely while breastfeeding/nursing, pumping, leaking, dripping, or otherwise expressing breast milk,” is exactly the kind of magic that should be bottled for adults everywhere.

Congratulations to Zack and Tupelo! They’ve each read for Quiet Lightning once (click their names in this graf to watch them). Both books will be printed in partnership with Tiny Splendor — get a feel for what they do (and a load of holiday gifts) at their open house on December 14th and/or 15th; you’ll see why we are thrilled to work with them!

QL has published 47 issues of sparkle + blink in our 48 months. When we first started publishing, we couldn’t even give copies to the authors; we could only afford to make 20 copies, the sales of which paid for the next month’s books. We wondered if that kind of publishing is wrong; we were getting the work out there, and people certainly read it… but we never wanted to be the Who’s Who of American High School Students of literature!

Thanks to everyone who has supported us — by coming to the shows, by purchasing books, by giving us grant money and by giving us beer — we have been able to make better books reach more people. Since July, we’ve given out copies of sparkle + blink to the first 100 people at each show. Sarah Ciston has had a large part in making this possible, and I’d like to thank her for not calling me crazy when I had the idea to do this contest (especially since it was less than a month after we more than quintupled our production). We are beyond proud to be able to publish these books by Zack and Tupelo — the very first two authors of Quiet Lightning Books — not only because it marks a new era for us, but because the books are wonderful and we can’t wait to share them with you.

A big serious thank you to everyone who entered our contest. We know it was a bit strange to ask you to hand-write your entries, but it was an absolute pleasure to read a collection of writings rendered so personally, with illustrations and comics and glitter, and from as far away as Australia, New York, and Ohio. Thank you for entering our contest; for writing; for meaning it enough to sign each word. If you want your book back, follow the asterisk.*

We’re celebrating four years on December 4th and there’s still room in Chicken John’s bus if you want a free ride to Fairfax, dinner and drinks on us (and a ride back, should you decide not to spend the night at Peri’s). Join us — at the drawing board; at the shows.

Beaming directly into you!

Evan Karp
for Quiet Lightning

 

* If you live in the Bay, you must pick it up at one of our shows (but first you must send us an email (to evan at quietlightning dot org) so we can keep yours safe at home until you’re ready for it); if you live outside CA, please send an email to the same address.