VIDEO: Cunningham Reads from His New Novel Q&A

Recently, from the comfort of my writing studio, I had the opportunity to read from my new book Q&A for a community of my peers during the alumni reunion of the Pan European MFA Program. One advantage of the virtual format for such a reading is the ease of incorporating visuals (including video!). It was a pleasure to trot this new novel out and to feel it getting a bit of wind in its mane after long days in the barn. Here's video evidence of the fact that I, for one, enjoyed the experience:

You can order your own copy of Q&A in hardcover or paperback from Regal House Publishing.

If you’d like further info about Q&A and my other work, please visit my website, follow my publishing company Atelier26 Books on Facebook, and consider signing up for Atelier26’s newsletter.

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The Largest Possible Audience

Revisit some prophetic words from the great Edward R Murrow, which are featured in M. Allen Cunningham's Q&A, arriving in paperback and ebook in January 2021. 

(For best viewing results, enlarge the video to full-screen.)

 

Cunningham Presents PERPETUA'S KIN at Powell's Books - FULL AUDIO

 

Listen to "M. Allen Cunningham Presents PERPETUA'S KIN at Powell's Books" on Spreaker.

During this event at the fabled Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon, Cunningham discusses his fourth novel PERPETUA'S KIN. A sweeping story of five generations in one American family, PERPETUA'S KIN spans much of North America, from the 1820s in Iowa to the American south during the Civil War to World War II San Francisco. In a structured presentation, Cunningham describes the story's origins, his research, the themes and characters, the influence of Shakespeare's Hamlet, and why this novel was 11 years in the making. He also reads short selections from the book. The event includes an audience Q&A. It was recorded on a rainy night in November 2018.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/m-allen-cunningham-presents-perpetuas-kin-at-powells-books/id1479000289?i=1000488106800

For Mrs. Dalloway Day

Virginia Woolf's magnificent Mrs. Dalloway was self-published 95 years ago today (May 14th) by Woolf's own Hogarth Press. Almost a century after its appearance this novel remains a profoundly strange and inspiring literary work -- still in many ways much bolder and more innovative than so many of our contemporary novels. 

In honor of the anniversary, I'm sharing my lecture on Woolf and Mrs. Dalloway given recently to my creative writing students at Portland State University. If you're a writer working against the grain of the times, you might find something here.


Listen to "M. Allen Cunningham Lectures on Mrs. Dalloway for Creative Writers" on Spreaker.

Prime Passage: "I am marvelously on the alert," from The Waves by Virginia Woolf

"They want a plot, do they? They want a reason? It is not enough for them, this ordinary scene. It is not enough to wait for the thing to be said as if it were written; to see the sentence lay its dab of clay precisely on the right place, making character; to perceive, suddenly, some group in outline against the sky. Yet if they want violence, I have seen death and murder and suicide all in one room. One comes in, one goes out. There are sobs on the staircase. I have heard threads broken and knots tied and the quiet stitching of white cambric going on and on on the knees of a woman. Why ask, like Louis, for a reason, or fly like Rhoda to some far grove and part the leaves of the laurels and look for statues? They say that one must beat one's wings against the storm in the belief that beyond this welter the sun shines; the sun falls sheer into pools that are fledged with willows. (Here it is November; the poor hold out matchboxes in wind-bitten fingers.) They say truth is to be found there entire, and virtue, that shuffles along here, down blind alleys, is to be had there perfect. Rhoda flies with her neck outstretched and blind fanatic eyes, past us. Louis, now so opulent, goes to his attic window among the blistered roofs and gazes where she has vanished, but must sit down in his office among the typewriters and the telephone and work it all out for our instruction, for our regeneration, and the reform of an unborn world.

"But now in this room, which I enter without knocking, things are said as if they had been written. I go to the bookcase. If I choose, I read half a page of anything. I need not speak. But I listen. I am marvelously on the alert. Certainly, one cannot read this poem without effort. The page is often corrupt and mud-stained, and torn and stuck together with faded leaves, with scraps of verbena or geranium. To read this poem one must have myriad eyes, like one of those lamps that turn on slabs of racing water at midnight in the Atlantic, when perhaps only a spray of seaweed pricks the surface, or suddenly the waves gape and up shoulders a monster. One must put aside antipathies and jealousies and not interrupt. One must have patience and infinite care and let the light sound, whether of spiders' delicate feet on a leaf or the chuckle of water in some irrelevant drainpipe, unfold too. Nothing is to be rejected in fear or horror. The poet who has written this page (what I read with people talking) has withdrawn. There are no commas or semicolons. The lines do not run in convenient lengths. Much is sheer nonsense. One must be skeptical, but throw caution to the winds and when the door opens accept absolutely. Also sometimes weep; also cut away ruthlessly with a slice of the blade soot, bark, hard accretions of all sorts. And so (while they talk) let down one's net deeper and deeper and gently draw in and bring to the surface what he said and she said and make poetry." -p.131-2
Virginia Woolf self-published The Waves through The Hogarth Press, 1931

M. Allen Cunningham's New Book Q&A: First Teaser

Q&A will appear from Regal House Publishing, fall 2020.