Events
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“Believing Our Own Stories:
Readings Celebrating 20 Years of
SMR”
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Readings by founder Jim Krusoe and frequent contributors Diane Lefer, Michelle Latiolais and Gary Amdahl in a benefit evening performance for the magazine. Music by country-honk ensemble Slow Wreck.
Friday, April 18 • 7pm • $20
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SMR Festschfrift at Beyond Baroque
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Prose! Praise! Cake! Live Music! Founding editor Jim Krusoe (Girl Factory, Blood Lake, Iceland) former editor Lee Montgomery (Whose World is This?) and current editor Andrew Tonkovich, host a festschrift for the magazine. Readers and revelers include Diane Lefer, Diane Gurman, Gary Amdahl, Janice Shapiro, Ariane Simard, Mary Otis, Monona Wali, Tod Goldberg, Jeff Solomon, Greg Bills, Dawna Kemper and more. Songs by The Fancies.
Friday, April 25 • 7:30pm • $7.00
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Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA
Visit the SMR/Santa Monica College booth at the 13th annual Festival of Books.
Saturday & Sunday, April 26 & 27 • 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
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Happy literary crowd at Dutton’s reading
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Diane Gurman, Andrew T., Monona Wali and Tod Goldberg
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Literary reveler
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Santa Monica Review reading at UC Irvine Bookstore, 2007
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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
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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
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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
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George Ducker, Vicki Forman and Colin Dickey at recent Dutton’s Brentwood reading to support Fall 2006 issue.
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