Writing Literature and Publishing Faculty Read from Their Latest Novels

Pirates, missionaries, Native Americans, a traveling ham, and a car accident are just some of the characters and incidents in the fictional stories written by Emerson Writing, Literature and Publishing (WLP) faculty members William Orem, Pamela Painter, and Frederick Reiken.

During the Writing, Literature and Publishing Reading Series program on December 1, the three celebrated authors read excerpts from their recently published books in front of a large audience in Emerson’s Bright Family Screening Room.

Writer-in-Residence William Orem read excerpts from his book Killer of Crying Deer, a story about a British boy who is shipwrecked in the Florida Keys in 1699. In his adventures, the boy encounters a bevy of pirates, missionaries, and Native Americans. Orem has been published in more than 100 journals and has published two collections of short stories, titled Zombi, You My Love and Across the River, which won the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize.

Second up was Professor Pamela Painter who read short stories from her collections Wouldn’t You Like to Know and Getting to Know the Weather. Painter’s writings explored everything from a traveling ham to the chaos of a car accident. Painter has been published in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and Ploughshares. She is the winner of three Pushcart Prizes and has received grants from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts.

Associate Professor Frederick Reiken ended the evening with a reading from his latest novel, Day for Night. The book features 10 narrators whose lives intersect in interesting and unusual ways by one connective thread. The book, which was published last spring, was chosen as one of Amazon Kindle’s top 100 eBooks for the last year. Reiken himself was recently listed in the London Daily Telegraph’s ranking of the 10 rising literary stars of 2010. Reiken has published three novels, with his second book, The Lost Legends of New Jersey, earning Best Book of the Year status from the Los Angeles Times and the Christian Science Monitor.