At 7 pm on Thursday, July 23, 2009, Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures continues its Summer Shorts series at the WYEP Community Broadcast Center on the South Side with "Iran Unveiled," a program featuring two Iranian women authors, Anahita Firouz and Moniro Ravanipour. The program is offered in collaboration with Pittsburgh City of Asylum.

Open Thread, the non-profit organization that hosted this past weekend's Small Press Festival (SPF) expo at Carnegie Mellon University's Miller Gallery, held a reading which featured three winners of its first-ever Tri-State Chapbook Contest, in partnership with Encyclopedia Destructica.

The preface to Volume 3 of pulp. begins the work with a note on its theme, a variation of medieval aesthetics that, in the form of a storybook rife with illuminated text and "other handcrafted visual elements inspired by the medieval time period," gives its readership "the epic, the tragic, the beautiful, and more than a Happily Ever After."

In Pittsburgh, a city known for balkanization, what with its countless neighborhoods and various parochial idiosyncrasies, the literary scene functions much like a fractal. It is constituted of a culture that encompasses communities of artists, musicians, publishers and writers within communities of artists, musicians, publishers and writers.

July 18, 2009, the opening day of the first-ever Pittsburgh Small Press Festival expo at Carnegie Mellon University's Miller Gallery did well to acknowledge the multifaceted nature of the Pittsburgh literary scene while highlighting the unity in diversity that provides a nucleus for an ever-widening cultural circle of artists in the Pittsburgh area.

Looking for an expert opinion on who constitutes the list of Pittsburgh's best poets, I decided to go to experienced veterans of the Burgh's ever-expanding circle of versesayers, Kris Collins and Scott Silsbe, who manage Caliban Book Shop on South Craig Street by day and satiate their poetic cravings by night, penning their own published (and soon-to-be published work) while running The New Yinzer online literary magazine and hosting poetry readings around town.

According to co-directors of Open Thread, Scott Andrew and Adam Atkinson, the Pittsburgh SPF was created specifically to "give authors, bookmakers, editors, and publishers an opportunity to sell their books-and provide Pittsburghers with a chance to more fully experience the region's small press community. Open Thread's mission is to establish frameworks for artistic discovery in Pittsburgh and the surrounding tri-state area."

What began as a somewhat awkward conversation about the general history and nature of The New Yinzer, developed into a comfortable, dare this writer say, dialectic, about writing and poetry itself. Below is a transcribed account of the discourse--between this Pittsburgh Literature Examiner, Collins, a Highland Park native and manager of Caliban, and Silsbe, a Detroit native and 2004 graduate of the University of Pittsburgh's MFA writing program--that diverges at parts, but comes back to one central tenet of The New Yinzer story and philosophy as the two Pittsburgh poets understand it: writing is a craft that requires an articulate and strong voice, far from sounding maudlin and akin to the seriousness of one who can, without forcing it, convey a convincing point of view about anything.

In this way, secondhand book shops have a charm and appeal that chain booksellers simply cannot create for being too polished, too big, too…corporate. In the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Oakland, one of the city’s smaller, yet more intellectually vibrant neighborhoods, is situated a glass-front store on South Craig Street called, Caliban Book Shop. It has just such an allure as only a niche retailer posseses to entice the curious window shopper into its literary vastness.

The namesake of an archetypal Shakespearean fool from the playwright’s poignant and late comedy of errors, The Tempest, Caliban has a mystique defined as much by its atmosphere as by the people who sell what they would label, “luxurious necessities.”

Monday nights are thus reserved as a time to introduce the Pittsburgh community to both lesser known and world famous authors, who meet for informal dialogue with everyday people looking to, in the immortal words of Thoreau, “suck the marrow out of life” in such evocative exchange as the lectures are known to inspire. Starting September 21, 2009, the series will kick off its 18th season with a succession of Monday night appearances by notable writers from various cultural and literary backgrounds. First on the list is Elizabeth Gilbert who will recount moments from her highly acclaimed and cult-status memoir, Eat, Pray, Love. In the program for the Lectures series, the memoir is described as chronicling a “year of travel in search of personal restoration,” replete with her experience of humanity in a story of “love, loss and self transformation.” Gilbert has been dubbed a “‘rock star author’” by no less than Oprah Winfrey herself.
Other distinguished guests include a mix of “newbies” and “old hats” alike, who have penned both cult favorites and book club blockbusters.