What Miranda July and Charlotte's Kathryn Schwille have in common

Miranda July

Question: What does award-winning Charlotte fiction writer Kathryn Schwille have in common with filmmaker and actor Miranda July, whose debut novel, "The First Bad Man," is being hailed as "so totally weird and wonderful" that it's like "watching an insane person dance"?

Schwille and July have been friends since high school?

No.

They were roommates at the Bread Loaf writers' colony?

No.

They both write about kinky sex?

Well, sort of.

The truth is, Miranda July graces the cover of a recent edition of Printer's Row Journal, in which Schwille's short story, "White Birch," appears. Printer's row is an experimental insert of The Chicago Tribune which goes only to premiere subscribers and which includes book reviews, long short stories and essays. Printer's Row, named for the area of Chicago where printers once had their shops, replaces the Tribune's former book pages.
In December, Schwille learned she was a finalist for this year's Pushcart Prizes, awarded to "important works published by small presses last year." The award was for her short-short story, "FM 104," which originally appeared in the literary journal Memorius. Other fiction has appeared in West Branch, River Styx, Sycamore Review and Crazyhorse. She was also a 2013 recipient of an artist's fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council.

Gorgeous, cunning poet Mark Strand is dead at 80

I hated hearing the news that the Pulitzer-winning former U.S. poet laureate Mark Strand had died on Saturday. Reports said he was at his daughter's home in Brooklyn, and that the illness was liposarcoma, cancer of the fat cells. He was 80.

I love Strand's poetry for its cunning and its dream-like magic, its confiding voice, its chair-and-pillow imagery. And he was wonderful to look at -- with his angular face and tall, lean frame.

I was at the Bread Loaf writers' colony near Middlebury, Vt., one August in the late 1970s when he was teaching there. I have a clear memory of him lazing on his side on a picnic blanket with a beautiful young woman whose single blonde braid trailed her back. The late-summer Vermont air shimmered around them, and all else fell away.

In a letter home, I wrote: "Mark Strand is breaking hearts right and left."

I also remember him in the classroom. He was wickedly brutal on  student poems, even occasionally sarcastic. I was surprised. But when I read his poetry, which I do again and again, year after year, he becomes pure, disembodied voice. Here is one of my favorites:

Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

I deeply regret there will be no more new Mark Strand poems. But if you're looking for one of  his books, I'd recommend his 2007 collection, "New Selected Poems," which the New Yorker's Dan Chiasson called "a necessary book," and named it "among the best work by any living poet."

Creech and Funderburk: Double-header at Queens University on Thursday

Two Queens University creative writing teachers -- Sarah Creech and Julie Funderburk -- will give a free public reading at 8 p.m., on Thursday in Ketner Auditorium on the Queens campus.

Creech is the author of  "Season of the Dragonflies," a rich, sensuous novel about generations of women who have made a fortune extracting the elixir of a magical flower that grows deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The scent has magical powers and imbues the wearer with good fortune. When the plant begins mysteriously to die, it's the younger daughter Lucia -- whose powers have been dormant for 33 years -- who comes into her own and saves the day.

Creech, who grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, lives with her husband, the poet Morrie Creech, and their two children in Charlotte.

Funderburk is the author of a new poetry collection, "Thoughts to Fold into Birds." Her poetry has appeared previously in such literary journals as Ploughshares, Best New Poets and The Cincinnati Review. She's won scholarships to Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers' conferences, and she serves as poetry editor of the online journal storySouth.

A former managing editor of the Greensboro Review, Funderburk was recently named a semi-finalist in the prestigious Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize.

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'I Love You More' author Jennifer Murphy says 'dreams do come true'

Former Charlottean Jennifer Murphy has concocted a doozy of a plot in her debut novel, "I Love You More" (Doubleday, $24.95). Lawyer Oliver Lane is shot to death in his Outer Banks rental cottage, and the prime suspects are his three wives, who are each unaware of the other but all sport the same haircut.
The star of the book is 12-year-old Picasso, Oliver's precocious and dictionary-reading daughter, who tries to make sense of what she knows and doesn't know.

Murphy

Kirkus Review calls this "a thoughtfully written, original and entertaining exploration of events ignited by love and lies."
Murphy, who now lives in Seattle, emailed me that her biggest dream was always to write and publish a novel. But as a former single working mom, a writing schedule was a luxury. She got serious after she went to the Wild Acres Writers Conference in Little Switzerland, N.C., and studied with novelist Ann Hood, who encouraged her.
At Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont, she met an agent, who offered to represent her. In 2011, Hood invited her to a conference in Tuscany, Italy. Murphy took 50 pages of her novel-in-progress, "I Love You More." Hood liked it so much, she advised her to dump the novel she'd been working on and stick with this one.
Nine months later, she completed "I Love You," and in a few more months, her agent sold it to Doubleday.
"It took awhile," she writes, "and there were a lot of rejections along the way. But ultimately I believe it was the stick-with-it-ness that made it happen."

Murphy, who served as executive director of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Art Commission, will read from  "I Love You More" at 2 p.m., Sunday, Sept. 7, at Park Road Books in Charlotte.