Launch Party for Nancy Stohlman’s
Searching for Suzi: a flash novel
Readings By:
Nancy Stohlman
Musical Guest:
Nick Busheff
Wednesday, December 2
6 PM
Mercury Cafe
2199 California St.
Denver, CO 80205
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!
For a full-resolution PDF of the flier, click here!
“Each and everyone of us is both victim and thief whenever we identify not with our own bodies, not with our own humanity, not with our animality (we so often forget that we are animals, that we are primates), not with the landbases that support us, but rather with the very system that exploits us, that is killing us. To lose one’s identity is to say, I am not a human whose body is rotten with the wastes of the industrial system, and whose mind is similarly polluted. I am not a human who loves this person and does not love that person, who has gifts and desires and insecurities and strengths and weaknesses all my own, but rather I am my job. I am a writer. I am an engineer. I am a scientist. I am an American. More simply still, I am my financial transactions. I am bits and bytes on hard drives all over the world. I am both simplified and fragmented. I am someone who lives in the out ring of the Panopticon, hoping and praying that I do not do anything to attract the attention of the all-seeing eye at the center, the all-seeing eye on the back of the dollar bill—the dollar bill with which I have come to identify, the dollar bill that will almost undoubtedly soon have RFID chips in it. I am someone who wants to get through the day—without unduly attracting the attention of those who have the power to punish me. This is how it is in school. This is how it is on the job. This is how it is in the culture at large. This is how it is and must be in the outer ring of the Panopticon.”
Derrick Jensen
“Creative people not infrequently experience periods of despair in which their ability to create anything new seems to have deserted them. This is often because a particular piece of work has become invested with such overwhelming importance that it is no longer possible to play with it. What Gibbon referred to as ‘The Vanity of Authors’ sometimes makes them regard their work with such desperate seriousness that ‘playing around’ with it becomes impossible. When this playful element disappears, joy goes with it, and so does any sense of being able to innovate.”
- Anthony Storr -
FOOD, Inc. is a desperately needed film meant to educate the public and assist us in making informed choices as to what foods to put into our bodies.
The filmmakers have courageously pulled the mask off of giant corporations who treat the human consumer in ways very similar to the animals they send off to slaughter.
It’s terrifying to think the health of our population and future of our country’s farmers seem to get no consideration in the quest for ever increasing profits; and that the very fabric of nature, meaning the seeds for growing our crops, are being mutated then copy written and privately owned from here to eternity.
Where is the regulation? Who is protecting us?
Watch this film and decide for yourself.
Searching for Suzi by Nancy Stohlman – Available Now!
For a free preview, click here: Searching for Suzi
From Monkey Puzzle Press:
What happens when an ex-stripper in her mid-thirties, married with children, awakens one day questioning what brought her to a current life of complicated domesticity? Compelled to return to Omaha after seventeen years, the narrator we only know as Natalie begins a quest into her past, an adventure that takes the reader from childhood beauty pageants to the sex and glamour industries. Natalie’s search becomes an intrepid journey through her own sexuality, a woman not only claiming herself but also accepting her contradictions. With inquisitive perception and agile use of perspective, Searching for Suzi is an investigation into the tragic shadows of a past preferred to be forgotten.
Here’s what people are saying about Searching for Suzi:
“Sexy, gutsy, raw and mature. A literary strip tease, Nancy Stohlman lures us through the layers of her dark world with the promise of exposing the ultimate sparkle…and ends up revealing something profound.”
Raymond Federman
Author of Double or Nothing
“Searching for Suzi offers syntax of desire itself – the complex, difficult, and beautiful ways we rupture into and beyond our own ghost-versions inside the mystery of hello and good-bye. Nancy Stohlman has written a spare, searing, and stunning book. It will wake you in the way that only necessary art can do.”
Selah Saterstrom
Author of The Meat and Spirit Plan
“In cheap pulp fiction, a stripper is either the helpless victim of sexual exploitation or the gutsy woman who makes the system work for her. Searching for Suzi is not pulp fiction. Nancy Stohlman smartly complicates the stereotypes with this story of a woman looking back on her life from a scrutinizing distance, separating the romantic images from the real and transforming the latter, through the art of storytelling, into something intimate and compelling.”
Danielle Dutton
Author of Attempts at a Life
$11.95 – Available at Monkey Puzzle Books and Amazon.com
Issue #8 is about to be unleashed!
For a free sample, click here!
Here’s what people are saying about Monkey Puzzle:
“Reading Monkey Puzzle is the literary journal equivalent to listening to Jim Morrison scream ‘COME ON!’ before the guitar solo in ‘Five To One,’ or watching a bad-assed version of Kurt Russell murdering a 1980’s computer chess machine with a glass of mid-shelf whiskey in John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing,’ or driving to Woody Creek Tavern for the first time and spending the entire afternoon getting loaded while sitting in Hunter Thompson’s old chair. Nate Jordon and Crew have a unique talent for collecting works that will make you want to dance, scream, rage, get drunk, affectionately latch onto the genitals of that special someone who’s genitals need a good latching on to, climb a mountain, change the world for the better, compose an opera and donate blood—all at the same time.”
- Rob Geisen, Author of Paper Thin and Beautiful Graveyards
“Have you ever paddled deep into the waters of the Lower Orinoco in Venezuela and looked longingly over the side of your oak dugout and there under the jungled canopy stuck your arm to the elbow into the muddy freshwater and felt the needle-teethed caribes suckling and gnawing at your digits until you lifted your hand and waved your bloody bone fingers at your face, blowing them kisses from your ecstatic mouth? Reading Monkey Puzzle is a lot like that. Reading Monkey Puzzle is like plunging into dark waters needleworked with piranhas, and coming away raw and stripped and blowing and laughing. Reading Monkey Puzzle is like discovering a honeyed mystery deep at the heart of your most cherished bloodied escapade.”
- Shane Joaquín Jiménez, Author of It Can Be That Way Still
“In a time when the written word is being pushed around by trendy-leather-pouch-eye-burning-Kindles, a human being can still pick up a book that is just as enthralling to read as it is to peer at. With poetry and prose that tickles the brain, teamed with photography that jumps off the page, Monkey Puzzle will continue to grow uninhibitedly. Monkey Puzzle, along with its founder and editor Nate Jordon, has cemented its place in a long history of rebellious publications.”
- Daniel Dissinger, Editor of In Stereo Press
Monkey Puzzle #8 features the following works of prose:
“excerpt from Visions of Neal” by John Allen Cassady
“excerpt from Searching for Suzi” by Nancy Stohlman
“A Real Sweet Thing” by Shane Joaquín Jiménez
“Snow Globes Are the Bane of Our Existence” by Leah Rogin-Roper
“Hills Like Golden Arches” by Dale Bridges
“excerpt from The Whole to The Parts” by Paige Doughty
“Z-Eros” by Paul A. Toth
“So, this is the beginning…” by Lily Scarborough Heehs
“Slowly Ringing Bells” by Ian Washburn
“War Wounds” by Stan Flukinger
“Getting Published” by Allan Richard Shapiro
“Van Gogh” by Lori Heflin
and the following works of poetry:
“Theosophy” by Tim Skeen
“4/4/09″ by Irene Joyce
“8th Week” by Violet Monday
“11:11 Didn’t Work” by Jonathan Montgomery
“black transistor series” by Michael Bernstein
“Classifications of Space-time Intervals…” by LaVonne Natasha Caesar
“The Coda” by Naomi Lore
“Coffee Shop Poetry” by Carlos Ponce-Melendez
“Danchel” by Mark Lamoruex
“Espresso” by Naomi Lore
“extermination of boredom” by Aimee Herman
“Graffiti on Mission Street” by Gerard Morel
“I Hope You Got a Copy of the Memo, Louise” by Barbara Price
“Impasse” by William Benton
“Isaac Newton’s Sister” by Karen Douglass
“Island Theory” by Andrew McEwan
“Jazz Toad” by Carolyn Zaikowski
“Letter Redacted” by Adrienne Dodt
“Musical Score for Desire” by Megan Burns
“My Dishy Canadian Cousin” by Corey Mesler
“No Apologies” by Olatundji Akpo-Sani
“Pacific” by Dennis Caswell
“A Phone Booth in Boylston” by William Doreski
“A Photograph of Rilke” by Barry Spacks
“Photographs” by Leticia Luna
“Possession” by Jessey Nickells
“Sanctuary” by Elisabeth Sharp McKetta
“Sea Blanket” by Leticia Luna
“Side Effects” May Include by Howie Good
“Something Comforting There Is” by Matt Dennison
“Speaking of Tehran on a Train” by Jasmine Marshall Armstrong
“Standing Naked” by Olatundji Akpo-Sani
“This is Not about Performing Anal” by Get In the Car, Helen
“Tipsy Love Song to Charlie Parker” by Emily Owens
“To a God Undiscovered” by Diane Klammer
“Walloon at Walgreens” by Lois Leveen
with photography by:
Alexandra Parsons
Cecilia Kunstadter
Jennifer Hamilton
Lily Scarborough Heehs
Michael Filimowicz
Nate Jordon
Peter Schwartz
Philip Meersman
Stacy Walsh
and artwork by:
Alex Nodopaka
Launch Party for Nancy Stohlman’s
Searching for Suzi: a flash novel
Readings By:
Nancy Stohlman
Musical Guest:
Nick Busheff
Wednesday, December 2
6 PM
Mercury Cafe
2199 California St.
Denver, CO 80205
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!
For a full-resolution PDF of the flier, click here!
“Shouldn’t it be an elementary rule of civilization that no human being should be deprived of heat or light or cooking fuel because of lack of money? Where does all that gas and electricity come from anyway? From coal, from oil, from the earth, from the stored energy of the sun, shining down for a billion years. Who took it on themselves, in some distant past, to sell the sun to Boston Edison? … These are life’s necessities, like food, air, water. They should not be the private property of corporations, which use them to hold us hostage to the dark, to the cold, until we pay their price.”
- Howard Zinn -
