March 6, 2018 | UHCL Staff
Although Hurricane Harvey’s high waters have long receded, many University of Houston-Clear Lake students are still struggling with the after-effects. That’s why Assistant Professor of Literature Joanna Eleftheriou, together with UH-Clear Lake’s Writing Center, have scheduled an open-mic event entitled, “Renewal,” on March 28 from 6-9 p.m. in the Garden Room of the Bayou Building. Audiences have the chance to hear two accomplished, recently published local authors as well as members of the audience who wish to share poetry or fiction of their own which deals with the theme of renewal.
“We chose the theme ‘Renewal’ because after Harvey, so many students in my creative writing classes were writing about loss and hardship,” Eleftheriou said. “Now it’s time to think about what comes after a loss and go into a space of thinking about new possibilities.”
Eleftheriou said she chose author Allegra Hyde to read from “Of This New World,” her recently published, John Simmons Short Fiction Prize-award winning collection of short stories. “Her work goes well with the theme of ‘renewal’ and she’s an accomplished young artist and role model in the community,” Eleftheriou said.
Hyde said that her works focused on how communities of people pursue certain utopic ideals. “I am interested in what drives people to go beyond conventional expectations,” she said. “My story collection touches on Shakers, hippies, and prospective Mars colonists among many other groups. The common thread among them is an insistence on aspiration—and that’s the literary energy I hope to bring to UHCL’s Renewal-themed reading.”
Writing Center Assistant Director Conor Bracken invited University of Houston-Downtown Assistant Professor of English Daniel Peña to read from his Pushcart award-winning novel, “BANG: A Novel.”
“His prose, his delivery and his engagement with Houston, including a great blogpost he wrote about surviving Harvey, made him a natural choice for a reading which focuses on how we rebound from adversity,” Bracken said. “He’s a talented, compassionate and invigorating writer who doesn’t shy away from the sticky and difficult politics of existing in liminal states and spaces, and I think due to this he has a particularly unique and valid perspective on living through and rebuilding after, and considering the many effects of Harvey. We are so fortunate to have him and Allegra to come and read to our students.”
“‘BANG’ is a project very close to my heart,” Peña said. “I worked on ‘BANG’ over so many different years in many different countries to get it to this final draft, and I’m excited to share the finished novel with UHCL.”
Peña said that when he started the book, he hadn’t recognized the ways in which the American drug war in Mexico and U.S. immigration policy were so interlinked. “I simply wanted to write a book about dignity, and I wasn’t sure how that was going to manifest,” he said. “The novel quickly became about that: the systems we create. I hope my novel speaks to that idea more than anything else. I hope my novel raises more questions than it answers, the most immediate one being, can you really blame a person for asserting or claiming their own dignity in this world? I don’t think you can.”
For more information about the Writing Center, visit www.uhcl.edu/writing-center.
