ASU student magazine to host annual reading, open mic night
Students, faculty and lovers of literature are invited to the Marooned Annual Reading and Open Mic event to take place at 6 p.m., Nov. 20, in the Durham Language & Literature Building’s faculty reading room (LL 316) on Arizona State University's Tempe campus.
Several writers published in the current issue of Marooned magazine will read from their poems and short fiction. All attendees will later have the opportunity to share their own work during the open mic portion of the event.
“I think the weather this time of year really lends itself to this event,” says Marooned faculty adviser Bob Haynes, an instructor in the Department of English within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
“There’s excitement in the air when it starts to cool off, and spirits are always high as everyone is looking forward to the holidays.”
Marooned is an on-campus, undergraduate publication of student short fiction, poetry, nonfiction and art. The magazine is supported by the ASU Department of English, and primarily run by student interns. These interns solicit and select fellow students’ work for publication, coordinate events, including the annual reading, and fundraise for the magazine, all while earning upper-division credit. Undergraduate authors from all academic disciplines can submit and see their work in print alongside featured faculty writers and distinguished ASU alumni.
Although student-focused, work published in Marooned is hardly sophomoric. For example, the fall 2014 issue includes short fiction by Taylor Eaton – “Things Were a Little Different once People Started Melting,” pages 13-17 – whose first line reads like a sci-fi poem: “I’d heard before that we dissolve into earth like it was some sort of giant recycling mechanism, that we return to some pre-human state of Oneness with all things, that we would soon be just a coagulation of energy.”
A poem by Shane Chergosky (“Blisters,” page 48) ruminates on the writer’s curse: “The left. My good hand. From thumb / to docile pinky the skin wears thin / and lifts, reddening; early signs of corrosion.”
Photographic art by December Verbout (“Some Things are Better Left Unsaid”) provides attractive cover dressing for the issue.
Work by ASU alumni is included as bookends. Lambda Award-winning novelist and humorist Bill Konigsberg, MFA creative writing 2005, contributes a short story (“Want,” pages 3-4) as the featured author, and Cave Canem Prize-winning poet Dexter Booth, MFA creative writing 2012, sits in the “Alumni Corner” with his gorgeous poem, “White Dwarves,” pages 79-81: “We aren’t that different from the cicadas / or the Century Plant; all we do is die. The / sounds we push out into the universe take their time to arrive.”
Current student interns – Michael Cohen, Elizabeth Hansen, Tamara Ignation, Haley Marshall and Madison Ruffner – will be on-hand at the reading to sell copies of Marooned, and refreshments will be available. All proceeds go to the production of next year’s edition and continued publication for artistic student voices in the future. The reading is free and open to all.
For more information about the reading and Marooned magazine, visit: http://www.asumarooned.net/.
Written by Michael Cohen