A writer watched her husband become enthralled with AI technology, using it as an outlet for his own type of storytelling. But, ChatGPT’s — and his — penchant for violent narratives made her wary.
When my husband, Gary, first started playing with ChatGPT, I thought it would be a passing fancy. He finds new technology intriguing and usually tries to test its limits before growing bored. But I reconsidered the intensity of his relationship with the program when I awoke at 2 a.m. one night to the light of his iPad and found him gleefully immersed in feeding the AI sitcom premises.
“Listen to this,” he said. “You’ve got to hear these stories. They’re fascinating.” He started with a show from his childhood, I Love Lucy. He gave the AI an era-appropriate but slightly risqué premise: “Fred buys Ethel a corset.” In ChatGPT’s plot, Ethel struggles to put the corset on, enlists Lucy’s help, fails, and then hands the corset over to Lucy, who also tries to put it on and gets stuck in it. The “girls” destroy the Ricardos’ NYC apartment in the process. Ricky gets home and bellows his trademark “Lucy!!!” Hilarity ensues.
Gary moved through the eras and sitcoms with the same premise until he got to Maude, the 1970s All in the Family spin-off, with its second-wave feminist protagonist and her supportive but not always enlightened husband, Walter. “Walter gives Maude a corset,” Gary prompted. The real Maude would have protested; what did she need a corset for?
At the Longfellow House in Cambridge, MA, poet Afaa Weaver will be the recipient of our New England Poetry Club’s prestigious Golden Rose Award. Last year’s winner was Patricia Smith.
Artem Mozgovoy discusses his debut novel, Spring in Siberia, with the managing editor of Red Hen Press, Dr. Kate Gale. The work has been praised by Publishers Weekly as a “superb debut”, “touching and well written, genuinely compelling and convincing” by Sir Stephen Fry, and “a capacious work of vision, courage, and thoroughness” by Ocean Vuong.
Artem takes Kate through his childhood in central Siberia, his career starting as a cadet reporter at 16 and the editor-in-chief by 26, and, eventually, his shift into creative writing.
Debut novel Aqueous by author Jade Shyback captures young imaginations
Aqueous is a Young Adult thriller set on the brink of the Earth’s collapse…which sends young Marisol Blaise to live in a colony beneath the sea. Author Jade Shyback tells us why she wanted to write a novel for young adults.
When David Mas Masumoto is contacted by a stranger regarding his maternal aunt Shizuko, he is at first slightly confused. From family, he has only heard whispers of Shizuko, who was institutionalized, and if the information is correct, she would now be ninety-three; it was assumed she was dead.
In A Fire in the Hills (Red Hen, Apr.), Afaa Weaver seeks to define himself in relation to his environment, particularly as a Black man in the United States.
…novelist Laila Halaby’s The Weight of Ghosts (Red Hen, Sept.), about her 21-year-old son’s death at a time of national upheaval.
Loafing is the most popular lesson of my 20-year teaching career. I got the idea from Walt Whitman, who writes in “Song of Myself”:
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
This made me think students might enjoy loafing — especially when I realized that they didn’t know what loafing means.
So one day we learned by doing. I took my English class at Grand Arts High School in downtown out to a vast lawn on campus perfect for loafing, which I told the teens meant doing anything they enjoyed so long as it was low-key. They loved having the freedom to sit or lie on the grass, looking up at the sky or down at bugs and tiny flowers, having heartfelt conversations, freeing their minds. For the rest of the school year, students asked if we could go loafing again.
My answer was yes.
STONINGTON — In a dark green, cozy room decorated with icons, books, poetry and antiques, Lara Ehrlich sat at a large table, while her puppy, Cocoa, slept in a chair nearby.
“I have leaves over there that will expand the table by multiple feet. I think it’ll seat 10 to 12 people,” said Ehrlich, who plans to teach classes and hold events at Thought Fox Writers Den, her new writing center and retail shop located in the Velvet Mill.
In 1942, a Japanese American family relinquishes their daughter to the state to protect her from being sent to forced relocation camps during the war. Seventy years later, her nephew will receive a call from a funeral home, asking for his mom. They want to reconnect his “lost” aunt with her family.
This is the story of farmer and writer, Mas Masumoto, and how he discovered his aunt, Shizuko, was still alive and living in a nursing home a few miles from his family home. In his memoir, Secret Harvests, Masumoto explores his family’s history to learn how Shizuko became a ward of the state during WWII, what her life was like during the 70 years she was institutionalized, and how history shaped his family’s journey in the U.S.
We met up over Zoom to talk about his memoir, alien land laws, farming, and how to share care with the world around us. This conversation has been edited for clarity.
“Reverence for the natural world provides her comfort, as does her fierce attachment to her sister and her parents’ poignant guidance. But it is the intimacy with another young woman that ultimately offers a path to healing.”
This is part of the description on the back of “From the Longing Orchard,” The latest release by local author and poet Jessica Jopp. She celebrated her official release of the novel on Wednesday at the White Whale Bookstore in Pittsburgh with poet Celeste Gainey.
The story was also awarded Red Hen Press’s Quill Prose Award in 2021, an award given to authors who identify as “queer” to be inclusive to all LGBTQ+ people. The award includes $1,000 and publication by Red Hen Press, the award’s sponsor.
I have a recurrent dream in which my mother refuses to feed me. A long table displaying an array of delectable foods stands before me. This is food that my mother has prepared, and though other family members are eating, I understand that this food is forbidden to me. Off to the side, as if on a different plane from the one I reside on, my mother appears, faded, like a copy from a printer running out of ink. Her words are muffled and sound as if they are coming from some faraway location. “Why can’t I eat?” I ask, but she can offer no explanation.
MacLeish Sq., Dennis Must’s curiously appealing new novel, takes the reader through the obscure final act of a man’s life. The main character, sixty-nine-year-old John Proctor, buys an old farmhouse on the outskirts of the desolate New England mill town he grew up in—the town he left when he was eighteen. Upon returning, John wishes for nothing but to settle “down here outside the derelict mill town of my childhood to savor the days each sunup deigns to grant me.”
Seventeen years ago, June was officially designated as National Caribbean Heritage Month in the United States. Who better to help us celebrate than Donna Hemans? Born and raised in Jamaica, the award-winning author has transported countless readers to the islands through her fiction. Here, she introduces us to five other authors who tackle the region’s rich culture and tangled history. Clear some room on your nightstand—these are books you do not want to miss!
