Lantern Awards

The Lantern Awards presented by The Lit were last night. It was a fairly fancy pants event at the Palace. Check out how cute I looked!

This is like the best picture taken of me in years!

Anyway, there were ten different categories, each with three nominees. The Man was up for "Poetry, Single Poem". It was cool to be nominated, but neither of us thought about it much in regards to winning or losing. It was an event to go to with free tickets that involved appetizers.

When we sat down in our seat, the awards themselves were sitting on the stage.
Each one was different and they had a flickering candle glow inside. That's when I wanted The Man to win because I wanted one of those lanterns!

Being a nominee for this award has kept The Man busy over the last month. He had to go to a photo shoot for the picture in the program.

He also had to go get videotaped talking and reading for the show they put up on the big screen.

Not a great picture, but that's really him talking away. The little lights underneath are the lanterns flickering.

He was really dreading the video parts, but he looked good and sounded smart.

And then he won his category. It was really cool when his name was announced. Since he wasn't planning on winning he had no idea what to say, but his acceptance speech was perfect.
Later on he had to accept the Lifetime Achievement award for Shelia Schwartz and that speech was even better. He had that one worked out a little bit in advance.
Dan Chaon won the award for Best Novel, but he couldn't be there and asked The Man to pick it up for him if he did win. So we ended up bringing three of the lovely little lanterns home.


Here's The Man's...

Here's Dan's...
Here's Shelia's...

Those are pages from her books wrapped around. Very cool.

Here's all three showing the side with their name and which award they won...
And all three lit up.I love that these awards are locally made pieces of art instead of something like a slab of polished wood with a brass plate or a block of etched glass. These little lanterns are just beautiful.

There's a nice write up of the event in today's Plain Dealer. It says that The Man is 43, which cracks me up, but he's not finding much humor in.

At the after party, he carried around the same plate of food all night but never ate because he kept talking to people. Not to worry, I put away enough appetizers for both of us.

You can dress her up...

Last weekend (actually the weekend before that at this point), The Man and I were invited to a fancy-pants poetry shin-dig thrown by The Lit. (That's the official fancy-pants literary society of Cleveland.)


This event was a celebration of The Lit turning 35 years old. In order to give the event even more oomph, they sent selected writers a photograph and asked them to write a response to it. The Man got asked to do one of these pieces and that's how we got invited.

Here are the tickets they gave us.
That side of the tickets aren't as interesting as this side:See the two different categories? While not immediately evident, the difference between having a Platinum ticket and being a Lit Lover is this:

Platinum ticket holders got a chair to sit on. Lit Lovers had to stand. And that was me. The non guest of honor. The plus one. Whatever you want to call me, I was the girl with the shoes that were built for cute not for extended standing around in an art gallery that was once a church. It didn't take long for my shoes to end up in the coat room and I spent the rest on the night barefoot.


The next thing I discovered was that while I brought the camera I forgot to put a memory card in it. The meant I could take a grand total of three pictures. Which is a shame because the location was beautiful and the appetizer buffet was beautiful and all of the hobnobbers were beautiful and the band was kicking it out.


The band? Oh yes, a snazzy little jazz band. They played while the everyone mingled and sampled the knock-you-out yummy snacks. They played while people debated over bidding on the silent auction items and while the wait staff whisked dishes and glasses out of your hands the moment you were done. The played while I went through many, many glasses of wine.


When the writers got up to read their pieces, the band accompanied them softly in the background. Some of the writers were obviously shook up by this intrusion on their art. Most of them ignored the band. But The Man worked the music into his reading and it was so cool!He owed that room!


To wrap up, here's the program. (Very fancy paper I might add.)

And here's proof that The Man has amazing friends.

And here's the unimpressive cover to the book that contains all of the photographs I mentioned before with the pieces written for them put together by The Lit to sell. It's actually very, very nice on the inside but they must have run out of money by the time the cover came around to design.


And what have we learned through all of this? It doesn't matter how fancy the party is, I always end up barefoot and tipsy.

Literary Greatness

Last night the man did his first fiction reading at Cleveland State reading from the novella. You want to read it? Here's the complicated way to get a copy. His book is listed on page 19, order form on page 86. Or I just discovered that it is also for sale over at Amazon which is so thrilling to me that I can barely type this!

The reading was in this little room at Trinity Commons that, if it wasn't for the interesting architecture, one could be a tad bit insulted that you were being asked to read in a room whose everyday use is obviously the storage of sheet music. Anyway, here's the man reading..

Okay, that's really Neil Gaiman and not even a picture I ever took of him. (Any of the pictures I've ever taken of Neil are just a blur of a man in black. Can't imagine why....) The actual man was one very tightly strung banjo before and during the reading and I'm certain the appearance of my camera would have sent him running through the stained glass windows to the street below. While he was all set to read some juicy bits and pieces of the book, the MC of the night caught him off guard with a request of one of his poems. The poor man held it together on the outside, but I could tell he was in tiny little shredded pieces inside. But once he started reading from the new book he did amazing. Funny, smooth and not a person in the room shifted in their seat the whole time. When it was all said and done and everyone had gone home, he posed for this shot, mostly just to show off the windows of said storage closet. He's not going to like that I posted this, but that's how the cookie (and the writer) crumbles!

Congratulations babe! You did great!