Alamo Bay Press
  • Home
  • Books
  • Authors
  • Bookstore
  • About
  • Contact

Six Questions for Poet Sybil Pittman Estess

1/23/2016

0 Comments

 
Picture
Tell us about the birth of your book. How did it get into this world?
 
Last spring, 2014, a friend suggested that it was time for me to put forward a “collected poems” issue, since I have been writing poetry for over thirty years and had four books plus a lengthy chapbook. I decided to try it, but name it “Selected Poems,” not “Collected Poems,” which connotes all.
 
Do you write every day to a schedule, or do you write in bursts and sprees.
 
Bursts and sprees. I wish that it were the other way.
 
Give us an idea of your writing method. First draft by hand or by computer. Do you outline or improvise?
 
I almost always write a hand-written draft. And I have a peculiar method: I HAVE TO WRITE ON UNLINED PAPER, plain white typing paper. I write anything at all that I write this way. I discovered in the last of my graduate school for my Ph.D. that lines get in the way of my thinking. I convinced all my professors but one to allow me to write my Ph.D. exams either by typing them (one took me all day) or on unlined paper. Once I learned that, it was literally like I had glasses on my thinking. I could see, and think—and the line blinders were removed. If I am writing a short essay, or review, the same is true: I have to write the first draft on white, only white, unlined typing paper. Nothing else. Only rarely, if a “burst” poem has hit me, I have written the first draft on the computer. (Then I print that out and work on it by hand, and begin again.”) I do not outline poems. I never have. I outline even the shortest essays or reviews, which I also consider essays.
 
What are your four or five (or ten) favorite books?
 
Willa Cather’s DEATH COMES TO THE ARCHBISHOP; Elizabeth Bishop’s THE COLLECTED POEMS; Wallace Stevens’ THE COLLECTED POEMS; Flannery O’Connor’s COLLECTED STORIES; Harper Lee’s TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Any memoir about surviving the Nazis in any way. (I have read about four new ones lately.) KITE RUNNER. Any book by Jane Hirshfield or by Edward Hirsch.
 
If you could be any character in a world of literature, who would you be?
 
Scout’s father, Atticus, in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, or the chauffer in DRIVING MISS DAISY.
 
We’re interested in your next creative endeavor—would you like to share information  about it?
 
YES. I have been asked to submit another 80-100 page book by the board of another small press. But my real passion is to finish my 300 memoir of growing up in Mississippi in the 1940s and 1950s. That era has passed It was unique in American history, for some good reasons. Very few persons are alive to remember it now. I want to set down my memories from early childhood until age 17, when I left for university and Texas. That’s my real passion next. (Although I do have the drafts of more than 80 poems to work on for the other project).


0 Comments

Another review for Like That

12/29/2015

2 Comments

 
Thanks to Harrison Kohler and the Concho River Review for this thoughtful and positive review of Like That, by Sybil Estess...

2 Comments

ABP at Texas Book festival

12/29/2015

2 Comments

 
2 Comments

Another Review for Cowtown Circle....

12/22/2015

0 Comments

 
Thanks to Texas Books in Review for running Caitlin McCrory's wonderful review of The Cowtown Circle...

Picture
0 Comments

Art Stronger Than Hate!

4/28/2015

0 Comments

 
Picture
Alamo Bay Press is delighted to announce the release of Art Stronger Than Hate!, by world-renowned artist Issa Nyaphaga.  

Art Stronger Than Hate! is a provocative, color cartoon book that offers a visual commentary on our current political, social, and economic world, arguing for Free Speech rather than Hate Speech.  Art Stronger Than Hate! is evidence that art can save lives and inspire the human spirit.

Author Issa Nyaphaga is a multimedia artist and human rights activist based in the U.S. He is globally known as a political cartoonist and a critical thinker who has collaborated with many well-known and established artists and institutions around the world. Back in the 1990's in his home country of Cameroon, Issa published over five thousand cartoons, drawings, illustrations, graphic novels and comics, reaching five million readers—many of whom are marginalized and illiterate. A contributing cartoonist for Charlie Hebdo in the late ‘90s in Paris, Issa was one of the four artists who spoke at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on March 6, 2015, addressing the issue of freedom of artistic expression.

Issa divides his time between Cameroon, France and the United States, where he mentors young artists and shares his work with the world. He now lives in Santa Fe, teaching at the community college and at the Tarnoff Art Center.




Art Stronger Than Hate!
by Issa Nyaphaga
ISBN: 978-0990863243


0 Comments

Reviews!

4/5/2015

0 Comments

 
ABP received a pair of great reviews for Dave Oliphant's The Cowtown Circle and for Sybil Estess's Like That. By Roberto Bonazzi, published in the San Antonio Express-News....
Picture
0 Comments

The Cowtown Circle Released

2/28/2015

2 Comments

 
Picture
Alamo Bay Press is very proud to release The Cowtown Circle, Dave Oliphant’s 13th book of poetry.

The poems in The Cowtown Circle are diverse and wide-ranging, dealing with nature, topical issues, and the imprisonment of captured WWII German soldiers in Hearne, Texas, to a section of María Poems (a series devoted to Dave’s wife, begun in 1976) and to sections on grandchildren and a visit to New York City, on music (classical, jazz, and Indian), and on U.S. Presidents. The title of the book refers to a group of modernist artists active in Ft. Worth, Texas (a city known as "cowtown" for its stockyards), during the Second World War.

Dave says he was influenced by many things during the writing of the book. “Whatever moved me at the time, my wife frequently, but also books that I had read—one entitled Lone Star Stalag—people I knew or had known, scenes that I saw, artwork that I came across, and music I heard…The title poem on artists in the city where I was born demonstrates the source for writing in one’s own environment, and the poems on my wife illustrate how the nearest source can be at home.”


Dave Oliphant taught and/or edited a scholarly journal at the University of Texas at Austin from 1976 to 2006. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, he won the TIL's 2011 Soeurette Diehl Fraser book translation award for his version of Chilean poet Nicanor Parra's Discursos de sobremesa (as After-Dinner Declarations). A second edition of his translation of a collection of poems by Chilean Enrique Lihn, entitled Figures of Speech, is forthcoming in 2015 from Host Publications. His series of poems entitled Memories of Texas Towns & Cities (begun in 1975 and completed in 2000) includes a 140-page poem on Austin that Michael King reported in The Texas Observer "takes its place. . . as a long poem in a modernist mode which makes an enduring contribution to the literature of its place, time, and country. And that's a great deal for any city to be proud of."



The Cowtown Circle
by Dave Oliphant
ISBN: 978-0990863212


2 Comments

Janie's Garden released

11/23/2014

3 Comments

 
Picture
Alamo Bay Press is very happy to announce the release of Janie’s Garden, a collection of poetry from the 2014 Alamo Bay Writers’ Workshop, which met in Seadrift, Texas.

“It’s a collection of work directly inspired by its setting,” says editor Lowell Mick White. “The workshop participants were meeting in a beautiful garden right on the edge of the bay, and what they experienced there, of course, found its way into their poems.”

Featured poets include Dorothy Barnett, Linda Caplin, Linda Dane, Graciela Fleming, Gina Harlow, Julie J. Johnson-Jones, Diane Kramer, Kathryn Lane, Barbara Williams Lewis, Bob Lindsey, Jay Minton, Aubrey Parker, Sophie Rousmaniere, Hazel Ward, and Janie Waghorne—the Janie of Janie’s Garden.

The workshop was led by Lee Meitzen Grue, who writes of the setting, “Surrounded by water, this is rich earth for growing flowers and is a fitting tribute. The garden has become a comfortable work of art like a painting you love and live with for a long time.”

“A poem about gardens is more than a book about gardens,” says Diane Wilson in the book’s introduction. “It’s a poem about the state of one’s soul and the poems in Janie’s Garden book are good indicators of the authors’ souls. At least I think so, but don’t sue me.”



Janie's Garden
Introduction by Diane Wilson
Edited by Lowell Mick White
ISBN:
978-0990863205


3 Comments
Forward>>
    Newer news on top.
    Please scroll down for more....

    RSS Feed

    Categories

    All
    1960s
    ABWW
    Africa
    Aggie
    Awards
    Backyard Volcano
    Between Two Gardens
    Bjorklund
    Cameroon
    Cartoon
    Creative Non-fiction
    Dave Oliphant
    Diane Wilson
    Ft. Worth
    Guidry
    Issa Nyaphaga
    Janie's Garden
    Jazz Poetry
    Kathryn Lane
    Lee Meitzen Grue
    Lowell Mick White
    Lyman Grant
    Memoir
    Poetry
    Questions
    San Antonio Book Festival
    Seadrift
    Soul Train
    Stoicism
    Texas
    Texas A&M
    The Cowtown Circle
    US And Them
    Winner
    Writer Interview