2010 Program Dates: August 1 - 14

ABOUT SLS LITHUANIA

From the SLS Founding Director

Lithuania – Vilnius’s hill-bound cathedrals’ spires conjoin, become one with the vertical threads of barely discernible rain in the billowing dusk. Right. Lithuania – one doesn’t know why one is quite so powerfully drawn to it. It’s very beautiful, sure, and some of the most famous Soviet-era movie actors, males by preponderance, were Lithuanian, but… Is it the history? The grand history of 15th-century Lithuania stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea? Or perhaps the tragic and convoluted history of Jews in that place? It must be, but that’s not the whole thing – or even a part of one…

We go where we can get lost, if you will, in an appropriately findable context, in the company of like-spirited people. We go to challenge ourselves, to get lost, yes, and be found, and re-discover some of the sum total of ourselves in the process.

You’re – different, you know. Right. A little, just a teeny bit different. The way an apple is different from… whatever. A piece of halibut or something. You’re a writer, for crying out loud! Hell! You are different! Yeah! You can do it, you can help it, goddammit -- your will is strong! Close your eyes, clench your fists and repeat after yourself: You won’t fall in love with it, you won’t fall in love with it, you won’t, you, you… You will, of course. There’s no choice. You know how it goes, don’t you? Therein lies the rub, as the saying goes, in terms of your being a writer and all and still succumbing to the inevitable. That’s what it’s all about, whatever it might be.…

We only go to places that mean something non-linear to us, signify something – ineffable, that’s right, yet also quite tangible, to put it fancily, to the literary parts of our beings.

Simply put, writers tend to like--and need--the company of other writers.

The rest remains to be seen. It always does.

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From the SLS CO-DIRECTOR

When I was invited to be co-director of SLS Lithuania, it felt like every thread in the tapestry was suddenly in the right place and the picture of my life had become clear. Lithuanian was my first language and until I was six, I believed all Americans had a home language that was different and dearer to them than the common English we spoke in public. Over the years, I came to value English as much as my native tongue, first using it to communicate as an actress to an audience, and ten years later, to learn to communicate to a much wider audience through creative writing. It is my deepest pleasure and honor to be allowed to introduce the intricacies of my motherland to a new group of world travelers—ones who happen to share my love of the written word.

You will be awed by this tiny country. You will wish you had more time. You will remember the flowers and the castles; the underground cavernous pubs and the magnificent homebrews. You might pick up an ancient language, you might encounter a few pagan gods. Or goddesses. Regardless of what you do with your time here, you will be amazed at how valuable you are to the local population, just because you call yourself a writer: this is a country that treasures creativity, that venerates a brilliant and novel idea, that knows the value of beauty and style and taste. Aesthetics are visible in every aspect of the Lithuanian culture. Attend the theater, your eyes will fall from your head. Walk into an art gallery, a pottery studio, or a jewelry shop, and be amazed. Take the short trip to the island castle of Trakai, to the breathtaking sand dunes of Nida, to the haunting Hill of Crosses…Or—just hang out with your fellow writers at one of the hundreds of outdoor cafés in Vilnius itself, eat ice cream and drink a cappuccino or a glass of Georgian wine, gape at the extraordinarily beautiful women walking in stilettos across wet cobblestones, marvel at the insanity of weekend bachelor/ette parties complete with intricate homemade costumes, listen to the musicians playing jazz on the streets, enjoy the pale sun that never sets, and just be.

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SLS Board of Directors

Mikhail Iossel (Concordia University)
Sara O'Leary (Concordia University)
Jeff Parker (University of Toronto)

SLS Advisory Board

David Beaty (Independent Writer)
James Boobar (University of Redlands)
Elizabeth Hodges (St. Petersburg Review)
Lucy Jilka (Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars)
Joshua Knelman (The Walrus magazine)
Linda Leith (Blue Metropolis Foundation)
Sam Lipsyte (Columbia University)
Phillip Lopate (Hofstra University) Fiona McCrae (Graywolf Press)
Josip Novakovich (Pennsylvania State University)
Catherine Tice (New York Review of Books)
Binyavanga Wainaina (Kwani? Literary Trust/Journal)

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Key Officers and Employees

Mikhail Iossel, CEO and Director. Mikhail Iossel was born in Leningrad, USSR, where he worked as an electromagnetic engineer and belonged to a circle of underground ("samizdat") writers, and emigrated to the United States in 1986. After receiving an MA degree in English/Creative Writing from the University of New Hampshire, he was awarded a Wallace Stegner fellowship in fiction at Stanford University. He subsequently taught creative writing, both on the undergraduate and graduate levels, at the University of Minnesota, New York University, the New School, St. Lawrence University, Union College and currently is on the faculty of the Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) writing program. Numerous publications in samizdat magazines in the former Soviet Union. Author of Every Hunter Wants to Know, a collection of stories (W.W. Norton) and co-editor (with Jeff Parker) of Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States (Dalkey Archive, 2004). a book of essays. Stories published in literary magazines in the US and abroad, translated in several foreign languages, anthologized in Best American Short Stories and elsewhere. Recipient of the NEA (1993) and the Guggenheim Foundation fellowships (1999). Founder (in 1998) and executive director of the Summer Literary Seminars, Inc., program--one of the world's largest international literary conferences (St. Petersburg, Russia; Nairobi-Lamu, Kenya).

Mike Spry, Programs Coordinator. Mike Spry lives in Montreal where he is the Managing Editor of Matrix magazine. He is a graduate of the Concordia University Creative Writing program, and the author of Jack (Snare Books, 2008), which was recently shortlisted for the Quebec Writer's Federation A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry.


Jeff Parker, Chief Operations Officer and Russia Program Director. Jeff Parker's fiction, nonfiction, and hypermedia have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Ploughshares, Tin House, Hobart, The Iowa Review, and other publications. His novel Ovenman will be published by Tin House Books in Summer 2007, and his cycle of stories The Back of the Line in collaboration with artist William Powhida will be released by DECODE Art Publishers in the Fall. For his work in hypermedia, he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2001. He co-edited the essay collection Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States (Dalkey Archive, 2004) with Mikhail Iossel. He has a BA in Journalism from the University of Florida and an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University, and he is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Eastern Michigan University, where he directs the interdisciplinary MA program. He sits on the Boards of Directors for 826michigan and SixBillion.org. He has worked with SLS since 1999 and is the Russia Program Director and Chief Operations Officer. He lives in Ypsilanti and Toronto.

Thomas Burke, Program Advisor and Kenya Program Director. Mr. Burke grew up outside Chicago and writes fiction and nonfiction. He received a BA from Union College and an MFA from UMASS Amherst. He has lived in Asia and Europe, and spent time in South America, Central America, and Africa . He teaches writing and lives in New York City.

Ann Ward, Program Administrator and Website Coordinator. Originally from Kingston, Ontario, Ann has written and traveled in India, Ireland and across Europe. Her poetry has appeared in MsGuided, CV2 and Feathertale, and her fiction was chosen by Colum McCann to appear in the 2009 Fish Anthology. Ann is co-creator of Montreal’s WithWords Press and is a graduate of the English and Creative Writing Program at Concordia University.

Mariya Gusev, Staff. 2007 will be her fifth year with SLS. Ms. Gusev is an editor for St. Petersburg Review, and formerly an editor for The Literary Review (2004-2006). She has received her BFA in Visual Arts from Rutgers University, and her MFA in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University, and has taught writing there. Her translation work includes poems by Dana Gioia and Nancy Willard for BibliObraz Literary Festival in Moscow, and street interviews with William T. Vollmann for the Russian chapters in Poor People (2007). Most recently her poetry can be found in In Posse Review. She lives and works in NYC.

John Goldbach, Program Assistant. John received his MA from Concordia University in Montreal, where he lives.

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