On May 3, Shady Lane Press hosted Central Florida literati at a private gala marking the launch of Short Houses With Wide Porches, a poetry collection by Kerouac House alum Christopher Watkins. The event, at the beautiful home of Summer Rodman and Steven McCall, raised over $5,000 for the project, which hosts emerging writers from all over the world for three-month, expense-paid residencies, and promotes the literary legacy of Jack Kerouac, one of America’s most iconic writers.

By the way … Chris’s book is fantastic! (You can buy it here: www.shadylanepress.com) Chris is also an accomplished singer/songwriter. You can learn more about him here: www.preacherboy.com 

Anyone in the New York area should definitely check out his upcoming book launch June 3rd at The Bowery Poetry Club. http://www.bowerypoetry.com/Event/41932

The books are in and they look great! Get yours now by clicking on the link at the top of the page. Christopher Watkins will be in Orlando for his book launch at Urban Think! in downtown Orlando May 2nd. He’s going to read from Short Houses With Wide Porches and play us a few songs from his “other” life as a singer/songwriter. You won’t want to miss this!

The buzz is building … we’re down to the final edits. We think we’ve got something fine here. But don’t take our word for it. Check out what these fine poets had to say:

 “The poems of Christopher Watkins are, at once, tender, shrewdly observed and enormously vital. This is a first collection that has the stamp of authenticity, of life fully lived and fully written.”

-Baron Wormser (former Poet Laureate of Maine, a Guggenheim Grant receipient, and the author of many award-winning collections of poetry, including his New & Selected due from Sarabande Books in May of 2008)

“In the poems of this debut collection, Christopher Watkins carries on the tradition of the man in whose house many of them were written, stalking the moment and playing it out like a musician on three vintage typewriters, always attuned to the clear vibration that sounds unmistakably when craft accompanies spontaneity. Here are poems both tender and wild, ‘moist as rotting leaves,/ dank as garbage,/ ripe with life.’”

-Jeffrey Harrison (author of four full-length books of poetry, including The Singing Underneath, selected by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series, recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as two Pushcart Prizes, the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets.)

“Send a blues traveler down to live in Jack Kerouac’s house in Florida, let him compose on his ’28 Underwood and tack dithyrambic hymns to the wall while Monk and Parker hold court, invite Bessie Smith, Han-Shan, and William Matthews in at the end of the day, imagine discourse-sparks and music-flares rising into the tinderbox night, and then imagine that those mad laments and ecstatic songs are coming from one voice, and that voice is talking to you quietly and thoughtfully, and all that superabundant life has been channeled into the fine excess of his music. The poems of Christopher Watkins are astonishing.”

-Ted Deppe (author of three books of poetry, Children of the Air (Alice James Books), The Wanderer King (Alice James) and Cape Clear: New and Selected Poems (Salmon Books, Ireland). His work has appeared in many journals, including Harper’s Magazine, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and Ploughshares. Ted has received a Pushcart Prize and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has served as writer-in-residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington, CT, the Poets House in Donegal, Ireland, and Phillips Academy in Andover, MA.)

Get your copy of Short Houses With Wide Porches, the debut poetry collection by Christopher Watkins. Most of the poems in this collection were started or completed during a three-month residency at The Kerouac House in Orlando, Fla., in the fall of 2006. Watkins drew inspiration for this work from the natural environment, and the sweet spirit of Kerouac, evoked by the house, fed by a steady diet of 1950s-era jazz, and channelled to paper through the Morse code of vintage typewriter keys rattling away till the wee hours. You won’t want to miss this, the third installment in our Kerouac Writers series.

Click here for more information on how to order your
copy of Short Houses with Wide Porches

Shady Lane Press has contracted with Christopher Watkins to publish Short Houses With Wide Porches. Christopher Watkins is a poet and songwriter. His poems are  appearing or have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The GW Review, Slipstream, Euphony, Talking River, and Red Rock Review, among others. He was the Fall 2006 Writer-in-Residence at The Kerouac House. He is a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA Program at The University of Southern Maine. As a songwriter, he has released five albums under the name Preacher Boy and has received a Gold Record for his songwriting work with Grammy-winning artist Eagle-Eye Cherry. He was raised in Iowa, Michigan, Italy and Washington and his lived with his missus, visual artist Amy Marinelli, in California, Ireland, Colorado, Illinois, and New York. This is his first poetry collection. Publication date: March 2008

Emily Nemens is the Fall 2007 writer in residence at the Kerouac House. Always striving to bring visual arts, design, and literature together in a compelling way, she has written and illustrated a graphic novel about the 2004 Madrid train bombings (on-view at www.nemens.com/madrid_comic.html), edited a book for the Education department of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and an excerpt of her first novel, Blue-eyed Apples, was selected for The L Magazine’s 2007 Literary Upstart Competition. She grew up in Seattle and graduated from Brown University in 2005. She now lives in Brooklyn, where she works as a writer, designer, painter, and occasional musician

Wash me, till I am whiter than snow.
–Kol Nidre Service, Gates of Repentance

Three of the four stories in Scrub were written during Emily Nemens’ first month as writer-in-residence at the Kerouac Project of Orlando in September 2007. The fourth, Blue-eyed Apples, is the prologue to her first novel and the piece she submitted to the Kerouac Project’s selection committee. The author illustrated the collection as well.

We’re happy to see Emily’s work in print and excited about her being part of the Shady Lane family. Emily will be reading from Scrub in the next few weeks at the Jack Kerouac House. Locations and information on the Kerouac House and The Jack Kerouac Project of Orlando can be found here.

Click here for more information on how to order your
copy of Scrub

Darlyn Finch’s Red Wax Rose is quickly becoming Shady Lane Press’s “Little Book that Could.” Just got word that Garrison Keillor will be reading Darlyn’s poem:  ”I {Heart}My Wife,” on The Writer’s Almanac, Thursday, June 21. Check your local NPR listings for times. The poem will also appear on The Writer’s Almanac website and daily e-mail. For a complete list of stations and broadcast times, click here: http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/stations/list.php

Congratulations Darlyn! Way to create a buzz!

Leslie Halpern of the online magazine Suite101 had this to say about Red Wax Rose:

This entertaining collection may prove especially inspiring for Southern women, although it includes slices-of-life to which we can all relate. — Leslie Halpern, Suite 101

http://poetry.suite101.com/article.cfm/book_review_red_wax_rose