Macondo, the annual writer’s workshop launched by San Antonio writer Sandra Cisneros starts this week. The workshop is only open to member writers (aka Macondistas), but the week is always capped off by a public event featuring prominent writers brought in to lead the week’s workshops. This year’s event takes on a Mexican wrestling theme, featuring literary heavyweights in Macondo Libre, a world class word wrestling event.

Former Austinite Zach Plague appears at BookPeople tonight in support of his debut novel, boring boring boring boring boring boring boring (Featherproof), a dizzying mixture of obsessive typography and design wrapped around a bonkers tale of sex and drugs. Another local link: the cover photo is by our own Mary Sledd. Fellow authors Amelia Gray and Ryan Markel join in for a reading of their work at 7pm. Check out Thursday's issue for a review of Plague's book.

If you're a teen girl, or you used to be a teen girl, or maybe once upon a time you dated a teen girl, or mothered one, then you know it can be a terrifying, isolating experience, full of mixed messages and fumbling boys undone by a bra snap. Sometimes you just want to feel like you're not alone, and that's where PaperDolls Magazine comes in.

With an admirable mission statement that pledges to not use girls "to sell products," the ad-free online magazine aims to cover "everything from health and sex, to media and art, to fashion and DIY projects." It was started by locals Jordi Finlay, Erin Gentry, and former Austinite (and much-missed Chronicle proofreader) Sofia Resnick.

Two-thirds of that equation will be at the PaperDolls launch party on July 26 at Ruta Maya from 6-9pm. They're advertising bands, a craft table, and free haircuts (really? 'cause that's kind of awesome). Event info can be found here, and you can check out the first issue of PaperDolls here when it goes live in August.

The University of Texas' Harry Ransom Center – unsurpassed in both the quality of its collection and in its ability/buying power to lure talent – figures strongly in a recent article in the UK's Guardian. (Last year, The New Yorker ran a fascinating profile of the HRC and director Tom Staley here.) The gist of the Guardian piece is that better-funded American universities are monopolizing the archives of British writers. In a bit of a bite-the-hand-that-feeds-you move, British author Jim Crace, who recently sold his papers to UT (and was interviewed here in the Chronicle), had this to say about his recent trip to Texas: "When I was at the Ransom Centre [the Texas university archive], I held Blake paintings and Coleridge notebooks in my hand. I couldn't help thinking that they didn't belong there." Many a British university archivist would say amen to that. "Two things are inevitable: death and Texas," one of them was heard to sigh. (Hat tip: The New Yorker's Book Bench)

Further incentive to pick up a book, from yesterday's Globe and Mail: "A group of Toronto researchers have compiled a body of evidence showing that bookworms have exceptionally strong people skills." (link via The New Yorker's The Book Bench)

John Wesley Coleman is the guitarist for them rowdy Golden Boys, but did you know he's also a poet, and (sorta) knows it? The wonderful folks over at Monofonus Press are putting out "American Trashcan," a collection of JWC's musings, written in 2005 during what he calls "January Bad Writing Month," with illustrations by Colleen Matzke. As self-deprecating and self-aware as Wes can be throughout his prose, "Trashcan" is also funny and revelatory in that 4am-can't-sleep-what-am-I-doing-with-my-life? kind of way. The book also comes with a CD of the same name. To celebrate, Wes reads from his book Saturday at the newly opened Domy Books, and plays with a mariachi band. Painter Michelle Devereux and video artist Max Juren will also have exhibits on display. 7pm.

Austin lost a native daughter and rising star last week when Shannon Leigh Lewis, age 20, died from injuries sustained during a cave diving accident in Florida. As a talented teenaged writer, Shannon Leigh turned performer when she and her mother, music professor Sheila Siobhan, began making the Austin poetry slam rounds. The two met slam master Ron Horne and the Texas Youth Word Collective was born. Shannon dazzled audiences at the Brave New Voices youth poetry slam festival, and snippets of her performances can be seen in Carl Brown’s moving documentary, 2nd Verse. She appeared in the sixth season of Russell Simmons' HBO series Def Poetry Jam, and last year came in third among individuals at the National Poetry Slam. (Shannon was profiled here in the Chronicle prior to the 2007 Nationals held in Austin.) Shannon had been a college student in Atlanta at the time of her accident on June 14. During her dive at Ginnie Springs in Florida, something went horribly wrong. She indicated to her partners that she was experiencing some discomfort and would return to the surface to investigate. What happened after that is a mystery, as she was discovered unconscious by a diving instructor, Mike Woods, while he and his wife were preparing to float down the Sante Fe River. Woods signaled to another diver, Steven Howe, and along with a doctor who’d been staying in the area, the group was able to bring Shannon to the surface, clear her lungs of water and bring back her pulse. She had been in critical condition at Shands HealthCare, University of Florida in Gainesville until she passed away in her sleep on June 30.

Since those halcyon days of deep-pocketed patrons are long gone, struggling writers typically have to make do with the occasional grant or free lit mag subscriptions. But for the lucky few – three so far – there's the pinch-me-I'm-dreaming Keene Prize for Literature, a not-uncontroversial $50,000 jackpot delivered annually to one University of Texas student or recent graduate. (In its two previous years of existence, the award amounted to $90,000, the world's largest student prize; this year, the top dog gets $50,000, while another $50,000 is divided between three finalists.) The 2008 Keene Prize for Literature goes to playwright George Brant, who was previously a finalist in 2006 and is a recent graduate of UT's Michener Center for Writers. In fact, all of this year's finalists are either current Michener students or recent grads, and all the Keene Prize winners since its inception in 2006 have been culled from the Michener Center ranks. I got nothing but love for the Michener Center (MCW '06, holla), but I do understand others' frustration at the mighty Michener's absolute dominance – one expressed by Seth Harp, a former economics major and the lone undergraduate finalist in 2006, in an impassioned 2007 Op-Ed in The Daily Texan titled "Give non-Michener writers a chance": "If an undergraduate ever wins, I vow to read James A. Michener's "Tales of the South Pacific" aloud, in its entirety, from the top of the Tower, clad only in this editorial." See ya next year, maybe? Full press release after the break:

Joseph O'Neill's novel Netherland melds a native Dutchman's immersion in the Staten Island school of cricket with his harrowing account of the immediate aftermath of 9/11, in which he and his wife, splintering under the stress, "were trying to understand, that is, if we were in a preapocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the thirties or the last citizens of Pompeii, or whether our situation was near-apocalyptic, like that of the Cold War inhabitants of New York, London, Washington, and, for that matter, Moscow." Netherland goes to some pretty dark places, but it's also very finely written and one of the best-reviewed books of the year. O'Neill will be at BookPeople tomorrow (Thursday) at 7pm to share some of that finely written stuff with you.