Tuesday, April 26, 2011

FAB 5. SUZANNE BURNS & BEN TANZER


BEN TANZER

PaintWriteDeathLifeArt (Sketches from a life in art) - decomP
http://decompmagazine.com/paintwritedeathlifeart.htm

What We Thought We Knew - RAGAD (by way of Blue Print Review and later included in Repetition Patterns)
http://www.blueprintreview.de/20whatwe.htm

Dick Cavett Says - Thieves Jargon
http://www.thievesjargon.com/workview.php?work=830

Daddy Dreariest - THE2NDHAND
http://www.the2ndhand.com/web69/daddy.html

Monday, April 25, 2011

STORYGLOSSIA 43. GRAVITY STRETCHING THE WHITE


STORYGLOSSIA never lets me down. It won't let you down either.

Gregory J. Wolos
Jessica Hollander
Ravi Mangla
Rebekah Matthews
Allison Slavick
Nicole Monaghan
Robert Swartwood
Shannon Derby

Saturday, April 16, 2011

HOT METAL BRIDGE. NEW ISSUE. SPRING 2011


Peep game:


FLASH FICTION

Jen Gann: “My White Apartment”

James Joseph Brown: “Snowman”

Amy Wright: “Bustling City”

Sherrie Flick: “The Remembering”

Tiegen Kosiak: “Ella and the Elephant”

J. A. Tyler: “Inside of my History are These Moments”

Eric Beeny: “A New Amnesia” and “Smoke”

Roy Buck: “Drag Queen Savior”

Damian Dressick: “Worship, Kinship, Imitation, Flattery”

Interview: Lydia Davis


NONFICTION

Sarah Simkin: “For Insurance Purposes: These Words Do Not Define Me”

Jesse Goolsby: “Not an Emergency”

Page McBee: “Giving Up the Ghost”


POETRY

Sherman Alexie: “The Search Engine,” “Love Song, with Anti-Coagulant”

Daniel Berkner: “Among the Winter Beginning,” “At Daybreak,” “The Art of Conversation,” “Never Again am I Allowed to Return to an Island”

Nicelle Davis: Uses for a Witch’s Eye—1.a Jaw Stopper,” “Uses for a Witch’s Eye—1.b Jaw Stopper.”

Darren C. Demaree: “EMILY AS RAG AND BONE”

Taylor Eagan: “one by one, becoming shade”

Ryan Luz: “John Rambo,” “Fathoms”

Mandy Malloy: “Don’t Tip-Toe Past the Witch’s Pool,” “no past tense”

Adam Million: “Bottomland,“South”

Tera Vale Ragan: “The Monday Garbage Man,” “There was a seed planted in a young boy’s head of the genus, bad word.”

Ciara Shuttleworth: “Taking Flight”

Eliot Khalil Wilson: “At the Wealthy Christian College,” “Senior Night at the Mystic Lake Casino”


LONGER FICTION

Richard Gegick: “Playing Cards”

Ethan Chatagnier: “Eulogies for Ms. Muir “

Megan Berlin Alderson: “Tell Me”

Olivia Kate Cerrone: “The Hunger Saint” excerpt of a novel with the same name

Friday, April 15, 2011

MORE STUFF TO READ. NICOLE MONAGHAN


NICOLE MONAGHAN
FOUNDLING REVIEW
THE LITTLE ROOM WHERE WE'D FIT

Excerpt:

I thought about pretending to have trouble connecting or adjusting bra straps so Justina would come inside the little room, close the door, and have to touch me again. I would ask her to look me up and down; she'd whisper “fantastic” and “amazing” in my ear and caress the silver lines of my stretch marks with her pink fingernails. Then, she'd touch the hollows of my breasts where fat used to be, and they’d rise up to her passion. If I just asked her, her eye lashes would flutter against all my unpretty and I’d hold on to the hook behind me with both hands while she proved I could be somebody else.

Monday, April 11, 2011

Sunday, April 10, 2011

HEY SMALL PRESS. GETTING BOOKS INTO LIBRARIES


From their website:

We are Hey Small Press!, a non-profit project promoting independent publishers to public libraries all over the United States. Founded by current and former public library employees, we exist to encourage libraries to acquire small and independent press books. We love good books and want them on library shelves!

Our method is three-fold. One: we select and review ten new or upcoming titles per month. Two: we send our list to public librarians and encourage them to order the titles. Three: we also make available all our reviews to the public. Our goal is for readers across the country to walk into their public library every month with our list of small press books and encourage librarians to order them.

Our long term goals include regional book lists, poetry and non-fiction lists, and the organizing and promotion of live readings by small press writers in public libraries.

Thursday, April 7, 2011

DOGZPLOT SUPERMOJOMANIA FREAKOUT TOUR AND COUNTRY EXPO

BRAND NEW WEBSITE FOR THIS:

DOGZPLOT is stomping through the Midwest from July 12 - 26 for a summer reading tour full of fiction, poetry, book festivals, music, friends, and mayhem. Please join us anywhere and everywhere along the way. Big thanks to everyone who continues to read, encourage, submit their flash fiction, help provide funding, and participate with us in any and all capacities. Your encouragement is appreciated much much more than you know.

This year we have plenty of company. Check out our lists ofcities, readers, presses, and venues we plan on sharing this experience with. And most importantly, please come join us if you can.

CAKETRAIN 2011 CHAPBOOK CONTEST WINNERS. SARAH ROSE ETTER. SARA LEVINE


SARAH ROSE ETTER
TONGUE PARTY

“Each small story is like sliding in skates over an ice pond—overhead beauty, victorious shouts, still soul, gigantic bravery.”
-- Deb Olin Unferth, Revolution

“Sarah Rose Etter’s Tongue Party is astonishing and unexpected and one of the finest books you will read this year. Her stories are beautiful and wildly imaginative and at times disturbing in dark, elegant ways. The women in her stories are strong and they are desperate, often in positions where they have to sacrifice far too much of themselves. And yet, through Sarah Rose’s masterful writing, these women become so much more. They become brave and defiant and like the stories themselves, absolutely unforgettable.”
-- Roxane Gay, Ayiti

“Tongue Party is fiction for we who are hungry, for those among us who ache, who crave, who have appetites that cannot be sated, who have holes in their hearts that will not easily be healed. In each of these short tales, Sarah Rose Etter remind us that it is not just what we are afraid to lose that will come to define us, but also the strange methods by which we cover over that loss, once it has come to pass. With fiercest compassion, a sharp wit, and unflinching prose, Etter delivers not only what it is that we are wanting but also the ways by which we need, by which we are always, all of us, needing.”
-- Matt Bell, How They Were Found

“I love Etter’s world of universal desires that drive each story into unexpected places, to koala tides and tongue parties. It’s a world bursting with the need to be both someone and no one, where characters are kept close but viewed from behind things, such as glass and chicken masks. Each word, each moment surprises. It’s a wondrous thing.”
-- Randall Brown, Mad to Live

“There are stories that show you the way things are, and ones that show you the way things might be, and then there are stories that tear you apart and build different things from the pieces. You might be happy with some of them, but I assure you, you won’t like them all. Sarah Rose Etter isn’t a writer; she’s a witch, and this is a house and storm of spells.”
-- Ben Loory, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day



SARA LEVINE
SHORT DARK ORACLES

“This book is a wonder. I laughed out loud early and kept on laughing, sometimes with recognition, sometimes with sheer delight at the precision with which Levine portrays the bafflement of being human and interacting with other humans. Read Short Dark Oracles for yourself and prepare to be both charmed and alarmed.”
-- Matthea Harvey, Modern Life

“Hemingway said somewhere that he wanted to write like Cezanne painted. In her vivid hyper-real collection, Short Dark Oracles, Sara Levine paints her way into even sharper and more dangerous corners. The fictions are an impasto of primed primary colors, prose that cuts a swath in brilliant swatches of saturated power that pops, punches, turns every turn into a fat flat facet, hard as a side of diamond, steel still-lives, glittering, metallic, distilled. Ernest be damned, I want to write like Sara Levine writes.”
-- Michael Martone, Four and a Quarter

“Levine’s narrators are self-aware, self-deprecating, sardonic and more than a little funny. ‘The Fainting Couch’ alone is worth the price of admission, but Oracles offers other treasures just as lovely.”
-- Cooper Renner, Mosefolket

“Hilarious and triumphant, these stories will startle you on every page, and on every page you will marvel over Levine’s intelligent, passionate mind.”
-- Deb Olin Unferth, Revolution


ALL INFO INCLUDING HOW TO ORDER:

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

AWP 2012 CHICAGO KICK-OFF PARTY


Yeah, we're really early on this. See you there...

Sunday, April 3, 2011

AUTHOR INTERVIEW: ERIC BEENY


Eric Beeny (b. 1981) is the author of THE DYING BLOOM (Pangur Ban Party, 2009), SNOWING FIREFLIES (Folded Word Press, 2010), OF CREATURES (Gold Wake Press, 2010), PSEUDO-MASOCHISM (Medulla Publishing, 2011), MILK LIKE A MELTED GHOST (Thumbscrews Press, 2011), and some other things. He blogs at Dead End on Progressive Ave. (http://ericbeeny.blogspot.com).

SNOWING FIREFLIES

Eric Beeny blurs the line between prose and poetry in this collection. His seemingly-simple tales of the way we cope with love and loss are woven into a rhythmic cloth. Rich in detail, even the Twitter-sized stories leave an afterimage.

Praise for Eric's work:
A quaint and mysterious little collection that balances the unreal and real. Eric Beeny writes with a child-like wonder, resulting in powerful surreal images, and a yearning for human connection. It’s a satisfying balancing act that I enjoyed immensely. I’m looking forward to the next thing Eric Beeny does. -- Shane Jones, Light Boxes


INTERVIEW

BG: Whether its making a snowangel in a mass of fireflies, growing an umbrella garden, or crumbs of words spilling out of people's mouths in the form of rainbows, your characters seem to be obsessed not only with the impossible, but with stretching the boundaries of imagination and thought and the natural world in order to control reality at a crucial moment in their lives, where the outcome depends on their ability to have faith in the impossible. Were you conscious of this almost superhero like quality in some of your characters as you were writing, or have I just taken too many literary criticism classes in grad school?

EB: Your description of disturbances in the natural world occurring at crucial moments in the characters’ lives is right on. People turn to faith and religion to ‘guide’ them through these crucial moments. As a ‘non-believer’, and from a sociological standpoint, I find this sudden shift toward [g]od—toward a belief system on a strictly PRN basis during crises—very interesting. Also, it’s fun juxtaposing the irrational, emotional realities which inform human perception of the external world with the illogical and often magical possibilities of surrealism to reorganize the physical laws of that external world. Hemingway (certainly a heavy realist) was big on metonymically substituting physical and emotional anatomies with landscapes and other external, concrete details. I employed that method a lot, I think.

I'm what Robert Browning would call a "superstitious atheist." I think a lot about how, for an atheist, I write a lot of magical shit. This is probably the result of OCD, a condition resulting in various superstitions. It causes me to ‘catastrophize’ and, in that ‘catastrophization’, all kinds of irrational and illogical things flash through my brain if only one aspect of a particular routine deviates even slightly. I think everyone has OCD to some extent, and this is a major reason why religion exists. Catastrophic thinking leads to believing things happen for a reason, despite how illogical the relationship between cause and effect seems (e.g., if I don’t start walking up the stairs with my left foot while blinking twice I’ll fail my geometry midterm), and the effect (or what appears to be an effect, e.g., a natural disaster) must be caused by something other than humans, something conscious, omniscient, atemporal, something that cares about/‘has a stake in’ humans events and gets upset when humans do ‘bad’ things. But who?—Oh, there must be ‘[g]ods’. Wait, no, we’ve amended that—there’s only one ‘[g]od’ who controls everything. We make up stories about how we feel. It’s difficult contemplating these feelings/thoughts alone but, at least with other people, people can suffer alone together. Hence, religion.

BG: Lots of unforgettable things happen to these characters, often times in their youth; getting beat down on the playground then fleeing to find comfort from a mother who isn't there or sneaking around Niagara Falls and encountering a couple having sex. Sometimes there is redemption or resolution for these characters and sometimes their isn't. How do you choose which ones to save and which ones to let suffer? And how much of Eric Beeny's actual childhood is in these stories?

EB: Some moments are autobiographical. I did get beat up a lot as a kid. On the playground, in school, at home. I was one of only three or four white people in the schools I went to from pre-k to junior high, so I was a ‘good target’, or something. We lived in ‘the projects’ until I was eight or nine, then we moved to the Black Rock/Riverside area of Buffalo, which wasn’t much better in terms of violence/crime. Throughout my childhood, my dad wasn’t there much. He lived with us but spent all his time at work, so I didn’t really see him. When he was around, he was too tired and often aggressive. I spent most of my time with my mom and sister, or just alone in my room playing with a few Legos. The only story in Fireflies featuring a father figure is the last one, “Staycation.”

I don’t see being ‘saved’ as being the end of ‘suffering’. I don’t think any of these characters are ‘saved’ at all (especially given that word’s religious implications). There is no ‘redemption’. I don’t see things ever resolving for these characters. They simply exist, conscious of their environments without questioning the logic of their environments (at least in terms of the laws of physics). At the same time, they’re no more aware of the implications of the emotional realities which seem to affect (and are affected by) the ‘real world’ they are trying desperately to alter (control) or escape through fantasy. Still, I don’t think these characters consciously control their environments—at least not in any concrete sense—any more than those environments are merely a reflection of their complete lack of ‘control’.

BG: The relationships between the male and female characters all seem so tender, so fragile, there seems to be so much disconnect; the males want communication, the females make themselves emotionally unavailable, the males want touch and feeling, the females shy away. It seems that the males have no natural solutions for this, so they turn again to the supernatural world for answers. What is it about these characters that begs for a magical solution to their problems? Why can't they figure things out on their own without eating fiberglass cotton candy or turning each other into balloons? But really, what I wanna know playa, how's Eric doing with the ladies? Who's the woman that broke your heart? Feel free to throw some whiskey down and get Freudian if you need to. We love you.

EB: Well said. Yeah, I like the idea of reversing ‘traditional’ or ‘socially perceived/acceptable’ gender roles. The males retreating toward magic is the same as any ‘nerd’s’ retreat into fantasy or RPG’s. It’s the same, too, with the human ‘need’ to have faith in [g]od (and to find like-minded people to share things with). People endure tragedy by clinging to faith, finding inspiration in biblical accounts like Job or whatever, hoping some externally produced miracle of fortune will alleviate their suffering—suffering the [g]od they believe in has caused by creating them, suffering which, if the story of Job is any indication (and, of course, if there is a [g]od), [g]od actively engages in for [h]is own personal pleasure. If a ‘miracle’ can be defined as any deviation in the physics laws of the natural world, then the characters in Fireflies are just like real humans who look for meaning in their lives and find none—so they invent meaning through fantasy. This seems like an organic, unconscious process in which they find only the ‘miracles’ they want to find.

How am I doing with the ladies? I guess ‘not good’ would be one way of putting it. Whatever ‘good’ means. I’ve stopped looking for anything like a relationship, which is probably ‘good’ for whoever I would be looking for. I’ve got OCD, anxiety/depression, I’m a recovering alcoholic (so I’ll have to pass on the whiskey), unemployed, a shitty writer, etc. I’ve got lots of shit I’d rather not hang on someone else’s hat rack (sorry for hanging it here), and (as I’m of course not the only person ‘suffering’ in the world) I’d certainly rather not deal with someone else’s problems at this point in my life. I’ve been single for about 6 years. I’m very lonely sometimes.

The woman who broke my heart…that would be my baby’s momma. I think it would’ve been a lot easier to get over her if I didn’t have to see her all the time, because of our daughter. It’s hard. I still love her, but I don’t think it’s in ‘that way’ anymore. It’s weird how you never really ‘get over’ someone (if you’re the one who didn’t want things to end), you just come to accept not being able to be with them—to accept that they’ve moved on and are in another relationship, that your daughter’s spending time with some other guy. It’s total alpha-male territorial bullshit, but it’s still hard to face and understand. Most of all, at this point in my life, I just want someone to cuddle with.


BG: There are very subtle connections between adult and child activities in this story, finger painting, adventures involving globes and maps, camping, playing with magnets, bugs, rainbows, etc. Can you talk a little bit about this? How and why these activities exist in childhood and carry over into adulthood? How are they significant to the characters and their lives and relationships?

EB: I think adults are just big children. I don’t think there is such a thing as ‘maturity’. We only manifest our childish behaviors differently as adults. Rather than think for ourselves, we still adhere to what other perceived authority figures tell us is right and wrong (i.e., politicians and pundits, religious leaders, mainstream news outlets, etc.), who serve (for their own benefit) as our surrogate parents. Rather than play blocks or freeze tag with friends, we jump off cliffs or out of airplanes for fun. Rather than throw tantrums because we can’t have a Reese’s peanut butter cup, we start wars and kill thousands of people we don’t know over oil and other made-up ‘strategic’ bullshit. We don’t grow up. We just get bigger.

Adults like to think of themselves as ‘mature’, but still behave like idiots. Innocence in the childhood activities of Fireflies is an effort to counteract the adult methods of occupying time listed above. I think as children we’re much smarter, more intuitive, much more capable of being in awe of something, to be completely aware but not fully understand. So much is lost in the course of getting bigger, so much lost in learning things. I wanted to give these characters back their innocence (after so much has been taken from them). I’m working on a novel now called Children, a subplot of which features adults holding children hostage hoping to find the secret to their small size and ability to have fun, and the children, tortured by the adults for this secret, figure out the only way to escape is to get bigger and become adults themselves. So again, no redemption in their being co-opted, in their growing chronologically closer to death just to simply survive.

BG: I really love the last story of the collection, Staycation, where a family camps in their own backyard. I kept thinking about their backstory and what their lives were like before the trip and how they had changed afterwards. For me, the magic was in the hidden story, the transformation of the characters after being together for so long and how quality time like that can bind a family together. In a way, that's what these characters were looking for all along; cohesive, meaningful connections with other warm blooded people who love them unconditionally. In that sense, does this story serve as the ultimate redemption for all the characters, or am I doing the MFA literary criticism thing again and I'm off in a different realm.

EB: Thanks for pointing that out! No, definitely not off in another realm. I chose this as the final story in the collection for a few reasons: It’s the longest of all the stories, it’s the only story in which the characters have names, and it seemed in many ways the ultimate expression/conclusion of the preceding stories—of what they were trying to ‘accomplish’. In the earlier stories, the characters who feel they are experiencing ‘love’ are ultimately alone and do not (yet) understand ‘love’ (“Goosebump Braille,” “Helium Prophylactic” and “Just a Normal Greeting”). They approach it as if they’ve never felt it before and, by feeling it (“Snowing Fireflies” and “The Umbrella Garden”)—or surviving its absence (“Invisible Fog” and “Lovers”)—, they’re learning about themselves (if ‘love’ can be considered anything other than mere chemical and hormonal reaction to a particular stimuli, which I don’t think it can).

In other stories, there is only one character, literally alone but experiencing no emotion (“Shovel” and “At the Science Museum”), and still in others the one character is alone experiencing emotion with no access to help (“Clouds” and “The Lost Boy Scout”). So “Staycation” seems like a potential flash forward for any one of these characters in which they feel they’ve ‘matured’ (intentionally contradicting my theory on ‘growing up’), that they’ve learned who they are and have developed an identity (hence, the protagonist finally has a name, a wife he feels he knows, and children they both have given names to—and the story itself adopts a more traditional narrative).

This is also maybe the most ‘realistic’ of the stories. The protagonist loses his job, wants to buy a pet bird to replace his kids’ bird that died, which they buried in the backyard. They’d already had the staycation planned, but it now becomes a symbol of his desire to leave everything behind, and his final statement (“Feels like we’re not even here.”) is his way of distancing himself from his life, from the family he’s helped create and the dwindling options it’s ultimately left him with (especially now with no job). Because of this there’s definitely an intense loneliness and guilt to him.

Despite his fear and not knowing what to do, he wants to maintain the life he’s created, just under different circumstances. He not only lies to himself to get through it. When his daughter asks where their dead pet is, he feels he’s lying to her by saying “up there in birdie heaven.” As a father, I’m very interested in the ways parents lie to their children to get them to ‘behave’ (religion and the concept of [g]od, to me, being the biggest lie). (Religious and political leaders use the concept of [g]od, as well, to motivate citizens to ‘behave’.)

BG: And a final question. For anyone reading this, there is a context for this question that has nothing to do with the story collection. Having met Eric "Beeny Bone" I know he shares my love for rap music, especially 90's rap (it's greatest decade). What are the top 10 rappers of all time and the top 10 albums. You can lump groups together as one, except for NWA, that's sorta cheating.

EB: Nice! Yeah, NWA is, of course, the shit, especially the way they opened things up politically. I can’t understand why people claim hip-hop is not an art form. Even the most violent rap music is no different than the medieval warrior culture poetry we all studied in high school. Beowulf, the King Arthur legends, etc. These poems/stories are immensely analogous to the violent qualities conservatives denigrate in rap music: plundering, pillaging, misogyny, boasting, exaggeration of one’s powers, etc. These two seemingly disparate cultures (Anglo-Saxon warrior culture poetry and ‘urban’ America) tackle the same themes. The violence depicted by Anglo-Saxons is, of course, perfectly acceptable (even canonized), but once it comes from African-Americans it becomes a force which threatens to ‘corrupt’ the white youth of America.

The real violence is the fact that white corporate America exploits and perpetuates an accepted view of African-American culture—one which whites have socially, economically and politically forced African-Americans into—to make money off their suffering. Mainstream record companies want ignorant-ass rappers getting constant airplay because it allows white youth to experience what they perceive as ‘black culture’ vicariously while keeping them afraid of what they’re trying so hard to emulate—so their fascination ultimately morphs into racism.

I feel very strongly about these ideas because I grew up in ‘the projects’, where I was the minority. As I mentioned, I was one of only three or four other white people in my schools from pre-k to junior high. I grew up in poverty. I’ve seen what America does to people. Rap music (just one expression of the Hip-Hop culture) is a direct reflection of this experience and, through its similarities with Anglo-Saxon warrior culture poetry, it’s obvious how the ideology of self-loathing permeates throughout the African-American community, just as it did during British imperial/colonial reign over most of the world from the 16th to the 20th centuries. The overtly racist ideology which the British empire forcefully promoted still exists today.

So, the idea of ‘black-on-black violence’ is incredibly appealing to white corporate America trying to sell that image back to blacks hoping to perpetuate its effects—to, in effect (“in effect”—remember that?), keep blacks in their place socially and politically while teaching them the only way out of the poverty they’ve endured for generations is to kill each other with drugs and guns, or to rap about drugs and guns to get those who don’t make it out rapping about drugs and guns to keep killing each other with drugs and guns—, and also selling this image to white youth who wish they had problems big enough to solve through the very violence they cathartically admire in rap music.

Anyway, I agree, Floatthe 90’s was definitely the greatest era in hip-hop because these ideas were being expressed by emerging socially conscious groups like Public Enemy, KRS-One/BDP, Wu-Tang Clan, De La Soul, etc. My 10 favorite rappers of all time…I don’t even know. Based on flow, lyrical content, beats. I think my list would look something like this, in no particular order:

MF Doom, Del the Funky Homosapien, Aesop Rock, Holocaust (AKA Warcloud, AKA Frank the Robot Tank), The GZA, Mos Def, Rakim, Styles P, Jadakiss, Eminem. But I'm leaving out so many. Top 10 albums would maybe go something like: MF Doom’s MM..Food?, MF Doom and Madlib’s Madvillainy, Del the Funky Homosapien’s Deltron 3030, Aesop Rock’s Float, Aesop Rock’s Labor Days, Mos Def’s Black on Both Sides, Talib Kweli’s Train of Thought, Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die, Killah Priest’s Heavy Mental and MHz’s Tablescraps. But there’s also Eric B. and Rakim’s Follow the Leader and De La Soul’s Stakes is High and so much else. I can’t pick and feel good about what I’ve picked. It will always feel like there’s so much I left out.