Events

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Santa Monica Review at UC Irvine: Readings by Michael Jaime-Becerra, Emily Quinlan & Andrew Tonkovich

Thursday, May 14, 2009 • 5 pm. • Free Join two contributors to the spring issue and SMR’s editor in a reading, with refreshments. Michael Jaime-Becerra is the author of Every Night is Ladies’ Night. He was raised in El Monte, California and teaches Creative Writing at UC Riverside. A recent short story appears in the collection Latinos in Lotusland. He recently completed his first novel. Emily Quinlan is a student in UC Irvine's MFA Creative Writing program. She is working on a novel and a collection of short stories. Andrew Tonkovich edits the Santa Monica Review. He hosts the weekly literary arts program, “Bibliocracy,” on radio station KPFK 90.7 FM, Mondays at noon. His fiction and essays have appeared in Green Mountains Review, OC Family, Orange Coast and the Los Angeles Times. The UC Irvine Bookstore is located on campus in the UCI Student Center, corner of West Peltason Dr. and Pereira Dr. (Page 889-J2 Thomas Guide Orange County Ed.) Parking is available in the PS4 (Student Center) parking structure. http://www.uci.edu/campusmap/

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Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA

Visit the SMR/Santa Monica College booth at the 14th annual Festival of Books.

Saturday & Sunday, April 25 & 26, 2009 • Free
Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA

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SMR in the OC

Readings by Spring issue contributors Linda Purdy, Lisa Alvarez, and editor Andrew Tonkovich.

Tuesday, May 13 • 5:30pm • Free
UC Irvine Bookstore, 210-B Student Center, Irvine
(949) 824-2665

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Dutton’s RIP

Andrew Tonkovich

Editing a literary magazine, reading hundreds of manuscripts, I have a relationship with writers which means communicating by mail, telephone and e-mail, and relying on the particular trust that requires. Accepting a story or essay, identifying corrections and sending proofs, sometimes over months, are acts of confidence. I sometimes shape a vision in my mind’s eye of a physical person, always wrong of course, which I discover upon meeting the handsome corpus and hearing a real voice. Not the authorial voice, not the persona imagined, but, as on the radio, somebody better and less.

Readings at Dutton’s were often the first and only time I met those writers. Impossible not to evoke Borges’ The Library of Babel and Fahrenheit 451 here, for all kinds of reasons. We hysterical, alarm-sounding bibliophiles, Perpetual Lamenters of the Dying or Uncherished Word, Chicken Littles crying over the pieces (pages) of the sky right there on the ground, we hate being right, and love being lost. Almost as much as we believe, simultaneously, in the perseverance of that hopeful/hopeless community of our fellow Grangers, book people who purposely confuse literature with life.

Moving room to room through the distinctive labyrinth of Dutton’s was like trying to solve that famous mathematical problem of the Seven Bridges of Konigsberg. Impossible, again, to walk down any one aisle just once, impossible to reconcile real life with possibility, and why would you want to? The weird architecture of the place is a tour through stacks with, thankfully, no solution but to trace your own Eulerian path — all wrong, all yours — and to discover along the way a fellow personification of the book standing there, or in the big west room or out in the courtyard, where an assembly of listeners on folding chairs sat while a real-life person read or recited as traffic passed by on San Vicente.

Difficult truths: Stores go out of business. We do not deserve our writers. Books will not die. So, yes, Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine.

Andrew Tonkovich edits Santa Monica Review.  Link to LA Weekly article

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Santa Monica Review reading at Dutton’s Brentwood, 2007

Happy literary crowd at Dutton’s reading

Diane Gurman, Andrew T., Monona Wali and Tod Goldberg

Literary reveler

Santa Monica Review reading at UC Irvine Bookstore, 2007

SMR contributors Alisa Slaughter and Diane Lefer (as Guantanamo detainee) read to support the new issue at UC Irvine’s bookstore.

Santa Monica Review reading at Dutton’s Brentwood, 2006

Left to right: Andrew Tonkovich, editor with contributors to Spring issue Natali Petricic, Kate Milliken and Jorge Saralegui.

Santa Monica Review reading at UC Irvine Bookstore, 2006

Jonathan Cohen and Vicki Forman, contributors to Fall 2006 issue. They read recently at a UC Irvine bookstore event in support of the issue.

Santa Monica Review reading at Duttons, Brentwood, 2006

George Ducker, Vicki Forman and Colin Dickey at recent Dutton’s Brentwood reading to support Fall 2006 issue.

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