Chicago's new Cultural Plan

I've been attending meetings for the new Cultural Plan for Chicago, and was quoted today in the Chicago Tribune article by Howard Reich, "Chicagoans Respond to Draft Chicago Cultural Plan." An excerpt: "When everything was flashing on the screen, it seemed very vague to me," added Gretchen Kalwinski, a writer. "We need specifics. As the group dissected the draft plan's recommendations for attracting and retaining artists, they dug into those specifics. Kalwinski and the others, for instance, ardently supported the plan's recommendation to "create a comprehensive system to accommodate space needs for artists and creative professionals. "My husband and I are both artists, and we may have to leave Chicago, because it has been so hard to find space to live and work (in) here," Kalwinski told her group. "My friends are leaving every week."

The Chicagoan Magazine

The inaugural issue of The Chicagoan is out! It was a pleasure to edit this, and to witness so many friends/writers get to stretch out with mighty word counts on fascinating subjects. As an editor-at-large for the project, launched by my pal J.C. Gabel, I got to read so many wonderful stories on, among others, Siskel & Ebert, vertical-farm/food business incubator The Plant, chef Tara Lane, outsider artist Peter Anton, a forgotten gangster, and more.

Writing from the senses 1-day class

Tomorrow, I'm teaching a one-hour class as a requirement of the teaching seminar for my MFA studies at Northwestern. The class is one I designed, titled "Writing from the Senses." My class, and about 10 others taught by my classmates, will be offered free of charge to the public, since it's a way for us to practice our teaching skills, so the crowd will be a friendly, receptive one. Still, I'm nervous, so I'm easing my anxiety by WAY over-preparing. Before we do the writing exercises, I'll distribute sensory prompts; i.e.,  so I'll pass around essential oils, a box filled with tactile objects, some music snippets, a number of odd images, and a few flavorful nuts and seeds. We'll also read some Proust aloud, natch.

Elizabeth Gilbert on Nurturing Creativity

“That’s the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at 9 in the morning.” A poignant & thought-provoking talk on genius and Socratic “daemons” living in artists’ walls to help them with their work. Yeah, Gilbert wrote Eat, Pray, Love. This still rocks.

Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity | Video on TED.com
www.ted.com
TED Talks Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses -- and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius. It's a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk.

Glorious Artist Residency at Ragdale

In November 2009, I received a Ragdale Artist Residency and just spent a spectacular three weeks there, working on my short fiction collection in Lake Forest, Illinois, writing, thinking, dreaming. Some pics are attached, and here's a Literago post I wrote on my time there.

Punk Planet; Book Review; Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs

The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs
Written by: Irvine Welsh
Review by: Gretchen Kalwinski

In Bedroom Secrets, Danny Skinner is a rakishly handsome, carousing restaurant inspector living in Edinburgh, plugging away just fine until Brian Kibby arrives as his co-worker. Kibby is seemingly unthreatening--quiet with "cowlike" eyes and a bit of a mama's boy, but generally inoffensive. However, Skinner immediately hates Kibby with an intensity that even he doesn't understand. Via his contempt and competitiveness, some of his long-languishing problems, long-clouded by booze begin to rise to the surface and throw his whole life into upheaval and disarray. He begins to pester his formerly punk-rock mother about his father's identity, (which she'll only jokingly give as Joe Strummer of The Clash), and throws away whatever was left of his relationship with Kay, a beautiful dancer who's been finding his drinking bouts increasingly tiresome.

Skinner eventually puts a curse on Kibby that results in the Star Trek and model train-obsessed boy beginning to suffer the damage of Skinner's abusive lifestyle. This sets in motion Kibby's declining health and Skinner's gleeful indulgences in even more booze, drugs, fighting, and sexcapades. Simultaneously, Skinner's search for his father's identity takes him to San Francisco and back via information he learns in a book penned by an obnoxious TV chef. Once he returns home, Kibby starts approaching death and begins to learn the ins-and-outs of the curse and how he might be able to reverse it.

This is Welsh's eighth novel centering around gritty, urban environments and one common critique of his work is that he's never departed from stock characters and themes from Trainspotting. It's true that the ho-hum-by-now grit is Welsh's schtick, but he's also got substance in spades. For all of his stock use of transgressive
content -- booze, drugs, orgies, sickness (and gratingly flagrant use of the c-word, by the way) -- Welsh knows how to tell a story in the old-fashioned sense of the word, a narrative that subtly builds tension in increasingly complex characters, delivers unexpected plot twists and resolutions, and conjures a reader's genuine investment in outcomes. Few writers handle the-beauty-of-ugliness themes as well as Welsh and the warm humanity of his deft language coupled with his insights into ego and the dark side of human nature makes Bedroom Secrets a compelling read.

--Gretchen Kalwinski