daniel prazer

by Daniel Prazer
Assistant Artistic Director
Originally published on the Story Week Blog.

You know how some mornings, you wake up with a song’s melody lodged so deeply inside your skull, you know it’s going to echo in there all day? Just rattle around like the last coffee beans in the bag?

That didn’t happen to me this morning.

I woke up at 5 a.m. from a Story Week dream. In it, I was stuffing envelopes full of bubbled-wrapped books to give to each of our amazingly talented guests as they arrive at the airport. Swag bags, you know? Except these were packed in once-sent padded envelopes that we’d staple shut. Hardly a swanky first impression. Then I opened my eyes, and instead of a song stuck up in my head, I had a to-do list.

Most of the organizers have Story Week dreams eventually, and most of mine come during the week itself. We spend months making sure nobody notices us. Really. A perfect example: last night at the Harold Washington Library, I used nylon zip ties and gaffer’s tape to hang a cloth Columbia College banner between two stanchions, the heavy-bottomed posts they use at the movie theater to keep the ticket line orderly. I did my best to center it in front of the stage, but you can’t tell how close you are when you’re standing a few feet away.
So I went to the back row of the Cindy Pritzker Auditorium. Chris DeGuire, an MFA grad and adjunct instructor at Columbia, helped me eyeball it. “It’s as close as you’re going to get it,” he told me. ”It’s centered enough that nobody’s going to notice it.”

Which is why Sheryl Johnston, Sam Weller, Randy Albers, Nicolette Kittinger, and everybody else in the Fiction Writing Department bust our asses as hard as we do. If we do our behind-the-scenes jobs well, you won’t notice all that goes into this year’s Story Week. You’ll just sit back, listen, learn, and, maybe most of all, have a hell of a good time.

My essay “No Experience Required,” published in the Fiction Writing Department anthology Hair Trigger 30, received an Gold Circle honorable mention at the Columbia Scholastic Press Association. And the magazine as a whole, for which I was a student editor, won, by my count, a total of sixteen CSPA awards, including the Gold Crown Award for general excellence.

Sorry I vanished for a couple weeks. I’ve been waist-deep in organizing the 2009 Story Week Festival of Writers. I’m not just saying this because I’m involved—anybody in Chicago this coming week really needs to come see this. Especially—ESPECIALLY Thursday night at Metro for Literary Rock and Roll. It’s going to kick so much ass.