Join us September 24 or 25 for the University of Chicago’s annual Phoenixphest event in 15+ cities across the U.S. and around the world. Phoenixphest is a decadelong tradition bringing graduates together for refreshments, conversation, and networking in their own cities.

Chicago’s event will be held on the 24th, at
Eivissa
1531 N Wells Street
Chicago, IL 60610
It will run from 6:30 to 8:30PM.

According to the website, “it’s one party you won’t want to miss.” Especially enticing for recent grads is the fact that members of the class of ‘09 don’t have to pay the admission charge, which is $15 in advance, or $20 at the door.

You can find more information (and register for the event) at the alumni website.

Great news– the Alumni Association has extended the early registration deadline until NEXT Friday, April 15. So, you still have the chance to get $10 off of your MAPH Reunion admission fee, making the event FREE!!

To register for the outing, please visit http://alumniweekend.uchicago.edu/events-register.shtml or call 800/955-0065

As a reminder, the event is Friday, June 5 at 7pm at Bin 36 in downtown Chicago.

If you have further please contact Heather Upshaw at hupshaw@uchicago.edu.

Cheers,

Linda

Good news, early registration for the MAPH Alumni Reunion has been extended until Friday, May 8th. If you register by this date, you will get $10 off the price of the event, making it FREE for you (though additional guests will still have to pay $10). As a reminder, the event will be at 7pm on Friday, June 5th at Bin 36 in downtown Chicago.

To register please visit: http://alumniweekend.uchicago.edu or call 800/955-0065

ALSO– we have made the MAPH Reunion a Facebook event to spread the word. Please add yourself and invite other MAPHers if you’re on Facebook (note: RSVPing on Facebook does NOT mean you’re registered. you still must go through the alumni weekend site)

If you have further questions or need to update your contact info with the Alumni Committee, please contact Heather Upshaw at hupshaw@uchicago.edu.

Take care,

Linda

Fort Red Border, a debut collection of poetry by Kiki Petrosino (04) is due out in August 2009 from Sarabande Books.

Gregory Lawless (04) will have his first book, I Thought I Was New Here, published in 2009 by BlazeVOX.

Our alum Anna Jarzab, AM ‘07, has just sold her thesis to a publisher, and she has graciously taken the time to share a little bit of that adventure with us.

-Braden

Even though I knew I wanted to write a creative thesis for MAPH, I never intended to write the project I ended up writing. I wanted to write a series of short stories based on my grandparents’ experiences in World War II, but it soon became clear to me that I wasn’t a mature enough writer yet to handle such dense, weighty material, and I didn’t have enough time to do the research that would be necessary.

Instead, I turned to a book I was working on in my spare time, and had been for almost five years at that point. It was a dark novel about a murdered teenage girl and how her two best friends team up to solve the case despite their differences. I was calling it All Unquiet Things, after a phrase in Canto Three of Byron’s long narrative poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

I’d written the book once before, in college, and I think I knew it was terrible before I typed “The End.” (I’m just kidding, I don’t do that, but you know what I mean.) Part of me just wanted to abandon it, but I couldn’t get it out of my head. The plot was no good, so I decided not to salvage anything except a couple of characters, and I rewrote the whole damn thing.

The first time I handed in pages for my Fiction Thesis class, my adviser Nic Pizzolatto looked me and said, “This is good, but you know it’s YA.” In all seriousness, that was the advice, out of all of the great and helpful advice Nic would give me in the next six months, that made the biggest difference to me because, while it didn’t change the way I proceeded to write the novel, it really did affect the way I approached the business of selling the novel.

I only turned in about sixty pages of the book for my official thesis project, but I actually ended up finishing it in its entirety by the time we graduated. I gave it a brutal edit at the beginning of the summer and then I put it away so that I could concentrate on finding an agent. At the same time, I started working at Browne & Miller Literary Associates, one of the six MAPH internships, because my goal was to move to New York at the end of the summer and get a job in publishing.

While at Browne & Miller I was fortunate to spend time with Joanna MacKenzie, another MAPH graduate and an associate agent. She and I have a very similar taste in YA–including an equally passionate admiration for literary YA author John Green–and both she and Danielle, the President of the agency, encouraged me to send them my thesis, which I eventually did in January of this year. In March, Joanna called and offered me representation. Lucky for me, we make a pretty great team.

Working with Joanna has been so much fun. It’s also been a lot of work–I think we went through three or four separate revisions of the manuscript since March–but it was worth it. I finished my last round of revisions in August, and Joanna started submitting to editors in early September. On September 9, the first of the six editors Joanna had contacted received the manuscript; on Tuesday, September 16, exactly a week to the day Joanna started submitting, we accepted a two-book pre-empt from Francoise Bui at Delacorte, an imprint of Random House.

I’m now busy editing my second book and pre-writing two more, all YA, all in the literary mystery subgenre, and awaiting an editorial letter on All Unquiet Things. Updates on these and other thrilling aspects of writing and being published can be found on my blog. It won’t be that ugly for long, I swear.

I can honestly say that none of this would have happened without MAPH. MAPH gave me the freedom and the time and the resources I needed to finish the novel. MAPH made it possible for me to work and learn from Nic Pizzolatto, who was an outstanding adviser, and Jon Enfield, my tirelessly supportive preceptor. I benefited tremendously from advice and feedback given by fellow MAPHers August Evans and Nickie Rodney, and I would probably never have met Joanna MacKenzie if it weren’t for the MAPH internship. So it’s a MAPH victory all around!

Anyone with questions, comments, concerns, worries, recipes, or limericks can email me at anna.jarzab@gmail.com.