Posts from the ‘my work’ Category

Feb 3

Shut Up/Look Pretty Roundtable at Necessary Fiction

Steve Himmer has published a pretty entertaining roundtable with the authors of Shut Up/Look Pretty at Necessary Fiction! Thanks, Steve. If you want to read some damn good writers discussing craft, process, great books, and Tralfamadorian romance novels, look no further.

Read it all here.

And order Shut Up/Look Pretty today before it sells out! You may want to get on that now, especially, because Tiny Hardcore Press has got a great deal going on where you get bundles for less! Including 2 THP books for sixteen bucks. They’re gorgeous books and that’s a good, great deal. Get on it!

Oct 21

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New Work in Gargoyle and Smokelong Quarterly

So, there are two magazines that I’ve wanted to be a part of for ages because I admire them so much–and in the space of a month, I’ve been published in both! This is pretty much the most exciting thing ever, not the least because I’ve gone through a bit of a dry spell in publishing, since I’ve been working so much on the novel and some much longer stories.

Both these issues are remarkable, remarkable, remarkable. As always, as ever, artistry shining sharp and deep through. I am surrounded in both by too many amazing writers to put to pen (or pixel) here, but take it from me: you must read both these publications all the way through.

My piece in Gargoyle, “The Woman Across the Water Wore the Shape of Love,” can be found here.

And my piece in Smokelong Quarterly (which you might like if you’re a fan of Peter Pan–or not a fan at all) is called Never Never, and can be found here.

Enjoy! And seriously–read the whole thing(s.)

Sep 30

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Guys. I’m in a book. With four killer lady writers. You should pre-order it.

It will be published by the awesome Tiny Hardcore Press, by Ms. Roxane Gay. It will be called Shut Up/Look Pretty. It will be sensational when it is released in January of next year. It will be filled with words by Erin Fitzgerald, Kirsty Logan, Lauren Becker, Michelle Reale, and me. It will be filled with words in the form of stories in the form of chapbooks. Here’s the description of mine:

The five stories in A Great Dark Sleep: Stories for the Next World explore death and what follows. These stories are by turns gothic, sweet, funny, fanciful, tragic, playful, and even gruesome. Whatever the tone, whatever the tune, these stories are all written in the language of loss: that ancient tongue the dead have left their loved ones to make sense of.

So anyway, you should definitely pre-order this book because holy shit is it going to be good. These writers will eat your bones and read them back to you like the I Ching. So here you are. And you are welcome.

Jan 21

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In which Robert Kloss and I are inspired by Beckett to write a story about fathers and meat and glass and ducks and labyrinths and cavemen and other things, too.

For January 2011, Steve Himmer over at Necessary Fiction asked past contributors to write new stories beginning with the last line of a story by someone else, for a month of fictional “first footing”.

Robert Kloss and I decided to write one together, using Beckett’s “Fizzle #6″ as a starting point and moving from there into this organic sort of thing. Fathers and dirt and glass and smashed things and cities and earth and meat and concrete and dead things emerged as we went along–which is probably par for the course as far as we’re concerned. Here’s a little bit of the story, “What we Dream About the Fathers:”

You have always been willing to bring him food, to clean his wounds, to hand him his spear and watch as he writes his name in the biggest spaces under the sky. You have always fed him the oil clumps of roast goose and duck while the aluminum tin of his canoe skimmed the green-black. The crisp beaks and the molted over eyes of the creature you pulled fat fistfuls of. The way his eyes skimmed along the peat and black, the way his eyes searched for the yellow eyes beneath, even as he chewed the greasy meat from your hands.

Read the whole thing here. You won’t be sorry. (Well, you might, but not for the reasons you think…)

Jan 17

Get yer JMWW Anthology V, hot off the presses and full of good words!

Everyone. You need to order this, and not because i’m in it–but because these people are: Lindsay Ahl, Matt Bell, George Blecher, Andrew Borgstrom, Callista Buchen, Alan Stewart Carl, Alexandra Chasin, Kim Chinquee, Robert Coover, SL Corsua, Patrick Dacey, Jeremy M. Davies, Nicelle Davis, Andy Devine, Spencer Dew, Brian Evenson, Jon-Michael Frank, Timothy Gager, Scott Garson, Katrina Gray, Justin Hamm, Jane Hammons, James Hannaham, Clarinda Harriss, Lily Hoang, Tim Horvath, Joanna Howard, Jamie Iredell, Brian Kiteley, Norman Lock, Ben Loory, Robert Lopez, Sean Lovelace, Miguel Morales, David Peak, Emily Peterson Crespo, Nate Pritts, Timothy Raymond, Ethel Rohan, Davis Schneiderman, Savannah Schroll Guz, Laura Ellen Scott, me, Ken Sparling, Terese Svoboda, and J.A. Tyler. Seriously. That’s a LOT of good shit. And it only costs $10. For 148 pages! You can get it here or at AWP.

And while you’re purchasing said anthology, don’t forget to check out jmww’s winter 2011 issue, now up and full of goodness.

Jan 5

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Skin flakes and spattered remains, only at Dark Sky Magazine.

The beautiful, recently revamped Dark Sky Magazine recently published one of my pieces, “When Your Carcass Hits the Cavass.” It was sort of inspired by boxing, sort of inspired by Cops, and sort of inspired by Phillip K. Dick. It’s kind of different for me; a bit rougher and more physical than a lot of the stuff I write. I like it. Here’s a bit from it:

After some painful maneuvering, he manages to get down belly first on the floor. Facedown so close he could lick the dust and dirt and filth right off from between those white grooves. He thinks of the shoes that must have worn down those grooves, the feet filling them cramped up with misery and awful hope. Wonders about the red-brown-yellow stains spilling across the middle of the floor. Are these small remainders biology or tragedy? Just a person’s sloughings, tiny pieces of hair and teeth and fingernails; what was once living is broken down to component parts. A skin flake is just a skin flake. An eyelash is just an eyelash. The body’s leftovers are myriad and mean.

You can read the rest here. Thank you, Brian and Kevin, for including me in such a terrific magazine!

Dec 27

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My story, “All the Imaginary People are Better at Life,” is up at Corium today.

This one has been a long, long time stuck in the birth canal, so I can’t thank Lauren Becker enough for grabbing it and yanking it out of there. It’s a much better story now because of her. (And because of the rest of my Verve posse, too. You all know who you are and you’re awesome.)

Anyway, that weird graphic description is just to say that this story, like anything you spend a long time on, is kind of near and dear to me. Here’s a bit of it:

Ruby knows she is selfish and silent and stark-raving. This is why she has to go away from everyone. This is why she has to go away from Randy; this along with all the other reasons that she can’t be with him. For starters, he will want to marry her, and then they will officially be Randy and Ruby Richter. They will have to start wearing matching track suits with puffy designs sewn on. They will have to start watching sporting events, and eating chips ‘n dip, and they will have to say it just like that: chips ‘n dip. Eventually they will have children, and they’ll have to give them names that start with R, like Ruthanne and Remus and Roxy and of course, Randy, Jr. They’ll acquire a minivan. They’ll use the minivan to shuttle children back and forth to soccer and baseball games, carrying loud and terrible musical instruments to band practice. She will go slowly mad until they have to put her in a padded cell shaped like a kitchen, because all she’ll want to do by then is bake brownies and cookies and cakes with names painted on in frosting, blue for the boys and pink for the girls and yellow for the ones who haven’t yet decided what they want to be, beautiful or strong because in this world you can’t be both.

By the way, when you’re done with my piece you’ll want to read through this issue in its entirety. It’s really, really great. Ravi Mangla, Meg Sefton, Peter Schwartz, Eric Bosse, Michelle Reale, Amelia Gray and Lindsay Hunter–yup, pretty much a do-not-miss-this-issue kind of issue. Thanks, Lauren and Heather. You ladies do some fine fine work.

Dec 24

My remix of Robert Kloss’s story makes a great last-minute stocking stuffer: suicide, silent film, clowns, and dysfunctional families.

Robert Kloss wrote a killer story called “The Clown Show.” Then he let a bunch of us hack it apart and remix it. Here’s my version today: it’s an homage to a favorite, silent movie great Lon Chaney Sr., and it’s called “Aria for the Clown’s Wife.”

Enjoy, and thanks Robert, for letting me beat up and twist around your story as much as I did.

Dec 10

Nick Ripatrazone Delivers Impressions of My Annalemma Story

Nick is continuing his awesome voyage through the entire issue of Annalemma 7. He has a lovely write up of my story, “You Will Be the Living Equation”, on his blog here.

Neat that he’s doing this. Nick’s mind works through these stories in a really interesting, immediate-yet-reflective way–I’m enjoying this in-depth look very much.

Dec 7

Robert Kloss Dismembers My Sleepers at Necessary Fiction

Today Robert Kloss has turned my sad, gentle little story into a rather terrifying dream poem. I love it. A bit of a peek at my story:

To sleep is to be in a state of rest, but these dreams are rarely restful. The men—and they are always men—who dream them knew nothing of rest when awake. Their lives were mad and glorious and they were pure motion, streaks of flame burning through their own eras, their brilliance blurring all down the centuries except the fact that there was brilliance, there is brilliance still, lying dormant and deep under the dreams. For gold, yes. For love, yes. For lust, yes, for blood, for glory, for power, for country, for freedom, and sometimes just for the sheer dear pleasure of the fight. The fortune won or lost or defended.

Read the rest and the remix here.