Last month I was invited to participate in Piethos, a competitive and totally sweet (literally) reading hosted by Brooklyn’s own Slice Magazine. The terms of the game:

Five representatives of various New York City area literary establishments (blogs, publications, online mags, bookstores) are given a writing prompt 48 hours before the event and have to write something to be read out loud and please a crowd. After anonymous audience votes are cast (and the host C.A.B. Fredricks admits that it’s only somewhat of a popularity contest for whoever can bring the most of their friends to the reading), the winner gets a freshly-baked pie made by Brooklyn’s own (I’ll stop saying that soon) Fat and Flour.

The prompt I received via email a day and a half before the event:

“Write a story based around a movie you have never seen.”

Mind you, anyone who knows me knows that I hate movies. Not only that but I am a nonfiction writer (mostly) and haven’t taken a real stab at short fiction since…probably…high school (that was almost a decade ago). But it turned out to be a wonderful literary challenge and I was actually pleased with the outcome.

While Lauren Spohrer very much deservedly so got the pie (she’s a repeat winner and wrote on a prompt about an older building falling in love with a younger building), I still took this business very seriously and had way more fun doing it than I could have anticipate. (Her piece was totally brilliant; it mixed architectural jargon with highfalutin romance in a way that was more sexually euphemistic than anything I’ve ever heard.)

The piece I wrote (in one sitting of about three hours!) weaves a story about a middle-aged Italian man living in Bay Ridge Brooklyn with the plots of a handful of movies I’ve never seen (or what I guess the plots of those films to be!). Whoever guesses the films included below wins an e-cookie.  Enjoy!

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A writer's block

What does a young writer look like to you? Conjure up an image in your mind. What do you see? Thick black glasses? A fuzzy sweater, holes conveniently poked near the ends of the sleeves for easy thumb access? A hunched, pale little person, jittery from too much coffee at the temp agency where they work, scuttling around and biding their time until they publish some brilliant collection of stories that they’ve slaved over, neat, symmetrical slices of their sad, sad life? Okay great, perfect. Now take that poor myopic sap and imagine them racing down the basketball court like a wild tiger – they’re on a fast break, they take off at the foul line, flying through the air, twisting and soaring until they throw down a monstrous, two-handed jam, shattering the backboard into a million crystal fragments. Completely free and uninhibited they stand there beneath the mangled hoop, screaming with primal fury, as the glass rain trickles down from above. Read more »

We here at Lit Drift are trying to take a look at how storytelling and literature are changing because of (and in spite of) popular culture.

But when some people talk about storytelling, they mean the oral tradition. Someone standing up in front of a group and talking, motioning with their hands, using facial expressions and sounds, dancing, laughing, relating. I’m increasingly finding myself drawn to this art of storytelling as it existed before all of our contemporary mediums…before radio, before television, before podcasts, before microfiction, before Twitter, before Facebook.

I know we’re called “Storytelling in the 21st Century,” but I guess I keep wanting to write like it’s …1899?  Maybe the 21st century of storytelling will start to look a bit like the last century when people get tired of technology and yearn for something more…human. Well, I might not be too far off since it seems that this ancient art of storytelling is in the midst of a revival.

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Equipped with a bevy of volunteers as well as materials found from a trash bin at a construction site, LA-based artist Liz Glynn, pictured at left, relived the rise and fall of Rome in a 24-hour-long participatory performance at the New Museum this past Monday & Tuesday. Description and photos after the jump. Read more »