Simpsonistas: Tales from
New Literary Project
Simpsonistas, published annually and distributed nationally, highlights fiction, poetry, essays, and conversation by many brilliant associates of New Literary Project. Authors include teenagers published for the first time alongside distinguished award-winning authors.
Series editor: Joseph Di Prisco.
Simpsonistas (Vol. 5)
Simpsonistas: Vol. 5 To this age of frenzied, moronic book banning and noxious culture wars, we offer the strongest response right here, in our programs whose impact will resonate in ways beyond what we can anticipate over the years to come. Our response: take a look at this work. You will be enlightened by it. And you will be better for it, that is, if you immerse yourself imaginatively in the struggles that take place on the printed page. On this score, make sure you read Andrew David King’s remarkable essay, included in this anthology, “My Life had Stood—a Loaded Gun…,” the title drawn from one of the greatest Emily Dickinson poems.
—Series Editor, Joseph Di Prisco, from the Preface of Vol. 5
Other celebrated authors found in these pages include: Manuel Munoz, Joyce Carol Oates, David Means, Mark Danner, Ian S. Maloney, and Carla Madden. In addition, the work of several Jack Hazard Fellows appear within the book, such as Sahar Mustafah, Emily Harnett, and Kate McQuade. These prominent writers are published alongside two of our Starn Fellows, one Simpson Fellow and a teacher, including: Carla Blackwell, Camila Elizabet Aguirre Aguilar, Andrew David King, and David Wood. We are honored to include writing from students in our Simpson Writing Workshops and Iris Starn Writing Workshops, and the particularly unforgettable pieces composed by teenage students from juvenile hall. These young men participated in the Simpson Writing Workshop conducted by New Literary Project in partnership with the University of California, Berkeley, English Department.
Read Excerpts from Simpsonistas (Vol. 5)
Writing from Mt. McKinley High School, Contra Costa Juvenile Hall
Authors identified by initials
“I’m physically caged but my mind is free
From sins. The evil is not in me
Why satisfy them? I got the key
Why give up hope when I could see.” — S. T.
“Freedom is the power to choose to be who you want to be around
To be who you want to be
To be free when you want to be free” —M. C.
Manuel Munoz, “Anyone Can Do It”
”Her immediate concern was money. It was a Friday when the men didn’t come home from the fields and, true, sometimes they wouldn’t return until late, the headlights of the neighborhood worktruck turning the corner, the men drunk and laughing from the bed of the pickup.”
Mark Danner, “The Slow-Motion Coup”
”Our political End Times glitter with surreal scenes—the green-tinted shock and awe unleashed over Baghdad, the “Brooks Brothers warriors” rioting at the Miami electon bureau, the jetliner piercing the Manhattan skyscraper—and beneath the unearthly beauty of the Capitol dome that frigid January day, I gazed in wonder at the latest of them: the heaving bodies in the winter clothes, the dark-uniformed, club-wielding police falling back before the phalanx of fists and bicycle racks and flagpoles, and floating over the straining limbs, the swirls and eddies of bear spray and tear gas in nauseous yellow and green. Was it all a grotesque mirage? Is this what revolution really looks like?”
Simpsonistas (Vol. 4)
Simpsonistas: Vol. 4 begins at the onset of creation. Conversations and references dot the pages of authors acclaimed and emerging—with many of the stories weaving together sensation and interpretation. We are told that “There is creative power in a pause,” and following the “plague year” of Simpsonistas Vol. 3, Vol. 4 is a rebirth. In it, Lorne M. Buchman quotes Joseph Di Prisco, Alex Ullman reflects on a fellowship at McKinley High School, and students have their poems juxtaposed with those of their teachers. The volume discusses the craft of creative writing through an analysis of entry points, and then does what the best books always proclaim to do—show, not tell.
Other celebrated authors found in these pages include: Danielle Evans, Joyce Carol Oates, Lauren Groff, Daniel Mason, Anthony Marra, Lise Gaston, and Lorne M. Buchman. In addition, several New Literary Project luminaries shine within the book, such as Jessica Laser, Noah Warren, Ian S. Maloney, and Diane Del Signore. These prominent writers are published among the next generation of talent—Simpson Writing Workshop students. These students, now published authors, write with a ferocity and a vivacity that demands to be heard; it demands to be read.
Read Excerpts from Simpsonistas (Vol. 4)
“Wings of Flames”
Excerpt from a poem by Cristal Reyes-Moran, Aspire Richmond College Preparatory Academy:
“7. Inside her
something ignited,
sparking
8. her pain—wings, she
flew
9. with burning flames; they
match
the burning sky.”
“Thug Emotions”
Excerpt from a poem by B.G., Contra Costa County Juvenile Hall, Mr. McKinley High School
“When that gate is open
When these chains are broken
Do I get loaded
Or get a job and stay focused?”
Lauren Groff, “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners”
”One night he woke with a jerk: the stars were angrily bright in the hospital window and someone in the room was breathing. There was a weight on his chest, and when he looked down, he found the woman’s sleeping head. For a moment, he didn’t know who she was. By the time he identified her, the feeling of unknowing had burrowed in. He would never know her; knowledge of another person was ungraspable, a cloud. He would never begin to hold another in his mind like an equation, pure and entire.”
Lorne M. Buchman, “Entering Uncertainty: Revelations of the Blank Page”
”The distinction illustrates compellingly how make to know shifts our sense of our creative process. It is not so much the replication of an already known notion or vision, but an unfolding of an idea in the making itself.”
Simpsonistas (Vol. 3)
Simpsonistas: Vol. 3 is available now from Rare Bird Books and distributed internationally. Series Editor is Joseph Di Prisco, and the anthology highlights the fiction, poetry, essays, and conversations produced by the many brilliant associates of New Literary Project. In Joe’s far-reaching preface, “Journal of our Plague Year,” he discusses the pandemic’s impact upon our local community and our nation, and he interrogates its literary, political, and existential ramifications. Contributors include teenage writers from our Simpson Writing Workshops, creative writing teachers from UC Berkeley, alongside Joyce Carol Oates (represented by her New Yorker story “Mastiff) and Daniel Mason, 2020 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Recipient. Daniel is represented by an interview with Regan McMahon that appeared in Zyzzyva, a rollicking excerpt from his The Winter Soldier, and a brilliant story from his most recent collection, A Registry of my Passage upon the Earth, for which he was named one of three finalists for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize.
Other celebrated authors found in these pages include: Noah Warren, Peter Orner, Maria Dahvana Headley, Laila Lalami, Anne Raeff, and T. Geronimo Johnson. In addition, several New Literary Project luminaries shine within the book, such as Shanti Ariker, David Wood, Michael Ross, Ian S. Maloney, Uttara Chintamani Chaudhuri, and Phillippa Kelly, dramaturg of the California Shakespeare Theater. For our Simpson Writing Workshop students, this is their first time seeing their work and their names in print. We are happy and proud to publish them, because, simply put, their work is continually surprising, fresh, impassioned, and beautiful. We’re confident this will not be their last publication.
Read Excerpts from Simpsonistas (Vol. 3)
“The Unstoppable Woman”
A poem by Amira Jourdan, Girls Inc., Alameda County Student
“Pope Francis Please Let Me Get Married”
A poem by Olivia Loscavio, Northgate High School Student
Uttara Chintamani Chaudhuri, “It Made Me Want to Sing Along”
“Awkwardly, I tried to frame the situation. As I chattered on nervously, the Junior Program Leader at Girls Inc., Carina Da Silva, typed into the small chat-box on the corner of the screen: ‘You’re making history y’all !!!!.’ Instantly, the tiny boxes that housed our students lit up with their smiles. A little shiver ran through me; the eerie thought of passing into Capital-H-History but also, despite everything, the girls’ infectious excitement had spilled over my computer screen.”
Maria Dahvana Headly, “The Mere Wife” (excerpt from the novel)”
“Say it. The beginning and the end at once. I’m facedown in a truck bed, getting ready to be dead. I think about praying, but I’ve never been any good at asking for help. I try to sing. There aren’t any songs for this. All I have is a line I read in a library book. All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.”
Simpsonistas (Vol. 2)
Vol. 2 Features: Joyce Carol Oates. Joyce Carol Oates Prize Winners: Laila Lalami, Anthony Marra, and T. Geronimo Johnson. Sigrid Nunez. Anne Raeff. Lori Ostlund. Genaro Padilla. John James. Douglas Light. Kim Dower. Beth Needel. Janine Noël. Francie Low. Ailani Bravo. Alexis Guzman. Alexandra Maldonado. Alexis Peters. Vanessa Smith. Laura Ritland. Writers from Contra Costa County Juvenile Hall. Olivia Loscavio. Grace Decker. Eliana Goldstein. David Wood. Diane Del Signore.
Read Excerpts from Simpsonistas (Vol. 2)
“Unruly Aura”
A poem by Los Angeles based poet Kim Dower, from her book Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave (Red Hen Press).
“Five Steps of Forgetting”
A poem by Grace Decker, Northgate High School Student
David Wood, “Teaching Voice”
“Nothing is more fun in an English classroom than hearing authentic voices come alive and expand. That is what the Simpson Literary Project gives to these young writers, a room of their own to express themselves. And so they did. What could be more indicative of the success of the Project than the vision that one of these young writers will be published in Simpsonistas again down the line, only this time in the company of some of the finest writers in the country, as one of them. I hope I am here to see it.”
Genaro Padilla, “‘A Big, Beautiful Wall’: Exclusion and Art along the U.S.- Mexican Border”
“Border art compels us to believe that minds and hearts can be changed, and that these aesthetic gestures and voices can shore up our common humanity, can bring us into a community of accruing force for mass action on the ground, at the border itself. Even when we are uncertain how much we can accomplish in the everyday we must still commit our art and literature to leave a trace, a historical record of an aesthetic response to a killing xenophobia at this and all borders.”
Simpsonistas (Vol. 1)
Vol. 1 highlights brilliant work by associates of the Simpson Project: Joyce Carol Oates, Anthony Marra, T. Geronimo Johnson, Samantha Hunt, Lori Ostlund, Martin Pousson, Ben Fountain, and many others, including Simpson Fellows as well as young writers appearing for the first time in print. Johnson and Marra were Simpson Prize Winners; Fountain, Hunt, Ostlund, and Pousson were Prize Finalists.
Excerpt from the Introduction by Joseph Di Prisco
What would our lives be like without storytelling?
That’s not a rhetorical question. Without stories, our lives would be, quite literally, unimaginable.
Storytelling may not be everything, but sometimes, when you catch yourself being swept up in a story, transported by the narrative, it can feel in the moment close to being everything, whatever everything might provisionally stand for besides everything. Crazy overstated? Maybe. Nevertheless, that is something like the case that T. Geronimo Johnson, 2017 Simpson Prize Recipient, makes about the importance of stories in his supercharged and allusive Berkeley commencement address, found here in these pages. To quote Johnson, “Humans cannot survive without story any more than they can survive without sunlight.”
Consider Joyce Carol Oates, Simpson Project Writer-in-Residence. She fashions a tantalizing, related argument in her illuminating, wide-ranging essay, “A Wounded Deer—Leaps Highest’: Motives for Metaphor,” included here as well, about writers artfully, urgently “bearing witness” in their stories, novels, and poems. In Oates’s words, “‘Bearing witness’ means giving voice to those whose voices have been muted, or destroyed; those who have been victims; those whose stories require a larger audience than they have received.”
Insights such as these resonate intensely for the Simpson Family Literary Project. Storytelling fosters empathy. Stories elicit passions and refine reflections. They bind us together in the language, and languages, of our shared humanity. It may seem distressingly self-evident that meaningful connections between people can sometimes prove elusive in our radically contentious Twitter / Facebook / Instagram / AI epoch. As far as the Simpson Project is concerned, however, it’s worth each ounce of our energy, each investment of the imagination, expended in the efforts to forge such life-affirming linkages—in and through stories. We believe that storytelling, when it kicks in, when it is internalized, when it is taught, creates and enriches communities. And if we frame storytelling that way, perhaps we just might be oonching closer and closer to the nongentrified, unboundaried worldwide neighborhood where, well, everything might indeed be very much on the table.
“We applaud these innovations and encourage more. More risky undertakings in the name of “speaking truth to power”—or in the name of sheer comic excess. More experimentations with genre. More publishing projects that introduce readers to writers both emerging and established, from cultures distant from our own. Especially we crave radical and subversive art from the margins of society, that challenges the authority of the center. More quirky, stubborn, rebellious voices to counteract the ubiquitous drone of social-media culture. More public support for all the arts—visual, musical, theatrical, dance, print—and not just the arts that reflect our own convictions.If our art sometimes provokes unexpected reactions this is the price we must pay for our commitment to bearing witness in a turbulent world.”
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