Postscripts

Resistencia: Shaken, Not Stirred

Last Saturday night, at the corner of South First and West Annie, near Resistencia Bookstore, a motorist in an SUV sped past a red light while fleeing an accident with a bicyclist. Running through the red light, the car smashed into another vehicle (with four people inside), and then busted into the chain link fence and wall surrounding Resistencia. No one was in the store since it had closed 30 minutes earlier, but flying rock and debris broke through the front glass door and crashed through the store's display cases. Everyone is reported to be recovering. Resistencia Collective is looking for donations of bricks, cement, nails, lumber, and paint, but says they're moving on "come hell or high water" by hosting a spoken-word poetry event already planned for this Saturday, Sept. 15 at 7pm titled "When the Fire and Rain Leave the Earth" in commemoration of liberation movements across the world. Call 416-8885 for more info... It's the Chronicle's 20th anniversary, and to honor it, we're putting on a variety of events happening this fall. One of them is a panel of writers that I'm going to moderate next Monday, Sept. 17, at 7pm at BookPeople. Hard-working novelists Sarah Bird, Carol Dawson, Kathy Hepinstall, and James Magnuson -- some of whom have day jobs, some of whom don't -- will talk about how they've financed their writing careers and made it through the lean years. But if you were planning on attending Iain Sinclair's reading at BookPeople on Saturday, he won't be there. Ken Wells, the author of Meely LaBuave and Junior's Leg, won't be at BookPeople on Friday as planned. Deepak Chopra does plan on being at BookPeople on Thursday, Sept. 13, at 7pm, but instead of promoting his new book Grow Older, Live Longer: Ten Steps to Reverse Aging, he will conduct group meditation to help people searching for some spiritual healing from this week's terrorist attacks. Call the store at 472-5050 to ascertain whether Chopra was able to arrive in Austin... SWT still plans on hosting Kate Wheeler, the insightful and deft author of last year's When Mountains Walked, now out in paperback, and a story collection, Not Where I Started From, on Monday, Sept. 17, at 7:30pm at the KAP Literary Center (508 Center St. in Kyle). Wheeler is in Shanghai writing a travel piece, so you should call 512/268-6637 to see if she actually made it to Kyle... UT's Center for Asian American Studies is hosting a reading and screening of poetry, fiction, and film by Asian-American graduate students from the Michener Center and the Radio-Television-Film department on Thursday, Sept. 20, from 7-9pm at the Flawn Academic Center. Call 232-6427 for more info... Also at 7pm on Thursday, Sept. 20, at Barnes & Noble Westlake is the Violet Crown Awards, the (11th) annual presentation by the Writers' League of Texas of the best books submitted in the categories of literary prose & poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. The finalists in the fiction category are Scott Blackwood, for his collection of short stories set in Austin, In the Shadow of Our House; Mike Blakely for Summer of Pearls, a novel set in Port Caddo, Texas, in 1874, and Clay Reynolds for Monuments, the third installment in his Sandhill Chronicles. In nonfiction, there's Looking for Carrascolendas, a memoir by Aida Barrera; Adventures in the Bone Trade: The Race to Discover Human Ancestors in Ethiopia's Afar Depression by UT professor Jon Kalb; and Rules for the Unruly by Marion Winik. In the literary prose & poetry category are Texarkana poet Wendy Taylor Carlisle's collection Reading Berryman to the Dog; Jack Myers' collection of poetry, The Glowing River; and Darryl Wimberley's A Tinker's Damn... Looking for Local Bestsellers? It's moved to Litera, in the Arts Listings section (see page 74).