You unwrap your cheese sandwiches slowly, eat them bite by bite, each bite chewed 11 times. 11 is your lucky number. Though you’ve never won anything in your life, you believe in luck completely. You carry a rabbit’s foot on your keychain, cross your toes inside your tennis shoes, wear red on prime number days. You blow on your eight-sided dice. You confuse luck with hope, of course, in the helpless way you have of getting anything that really matters wrong.

Enjoy! And happy rest-of-the-weekend.

I’m very excited, grateful, honored, and thrilled about this. Curbside is a great up-and-coming press and I’m joining terrific writers like Franki Elliot (Piano Rats) and Michael Czyzniejewski (Chicago Stories) at the press. As it gets closer to the big day, I’ll be announcing tour dates and stops as well. Can’t wait to see all your faces for real and sell you my book!

But in the end, I decided not to. I decided the series, although fascinating, has ended up being fairly depressing in its results. Because the majority of these former bullies seem to only vaguely remember their actions, or not remember them at all. Some of them didn’t even really remember who their former victims were. Some of these writers said that several of their former tormenters cheerfully and obliviously friended them on Facebook. Obviously most of these bullies grew up to be normal, happy, functioning individuals. Their bullying would seem to have had little effect on their psyches.

So basically, the takeaway would seem to be that while victims of bullying are emotionally and sometimes physically scarred, often for life,  the bullies are doing just fine. They barely remember inflicting the torment. They feel ashamed or embarrassed when reminded, but that will quickly pass.  In fact, the phone call or interview will probably make them feel a little better about themselves, since they’ve now apologized and redeemed themselves.

So can we learn anything from our past actions, from bullying or being bullied? It would seem in most cases, probably not. Or at least, nothing very positive or helpful.

I was bullied, mostly by a small group of boys but also by a few mean girls, throughout junior high. This was back when teachers and bus drivers and passersby would look the other way if a kid was getting picked on or shoved into a locker. I was definitely an easy target. I moved to a new school and didn’t know anybody. I had thick glasses and buck teeth and weird permed hair.  I also, like many bullied kids, had a weirdly independent streak, a sort of nerdy individualism and self-assurance that I think rubbed people the wrong way for whatever reason. I only remained like that for a few years, before I went to high school and become a normal, happy, functional human being. (It also helped that I moved from a school full of cheerleaders and football to an arts-friendly school.) But. Those few years of being bullied – both physically and emotionally – hurt me deeply in ways I would still very much like to lose forever. If you could pull those memories out of my head, I don’t think I would really mind.

The bully who said I was ugly, who threw pencils at my head on the bus, who slammed me into lockers and called me loser, who arranged to have a cute boy ask me out and then collapse into giggles when I said yes, who pushed my food tray onto the floor so many times that they drove me to pretend I was the nurse’s assistant (I was fooling no one) so that I could eat lunch in her office and not in the hellish cafeteria? The bullies who told me I’d be better off dead? Those bullies probably don’t even remember me. I ran into some of them later and they clearly had no memory of picking on me, or if they did they didn’t seem to think it was a big deal. To them it wasn’t. Most seemed to think I was being too sensitive, and that it was kind of weird that I brought it up. That was years ago, and they might feel differently now, but I’m willing to bet not.

Here’s what I learned from being bullied. I learned that children’s cruelty is astoundingly casual. I learned that being mean comes naturally to a lot of people, and good people are often cowards who’ll never stand up for what’s right. I learned that you can’t trust adults to help you, that many adults kind of think bullying is good for a kid, or just part of growing up, or that they secretly or not-so-secretly feel kids deserve it for being fat or gay or ugly or small or smart or whatever. I learned that violence is often the only way to stop bullies. My own bullying mostly ended after I finally clocked one of my bullies in the head with my oboe case (yes, how nerdy is that) and knocked him out cold. I learned that bullies are often bullied themselves, just like abusers. I learned that words are just as painful as a punch, and can change the way you look in your own mirror – even when you’re all alone. Words stay with you. They matter. And I learned the most devastating lesson of all: that while your bully’s name is forever etched in your brain matter, they may not remember you even existed at all. To you it was so personal, and to them perhaps you were nothing more than a body with the right requirements in the right place at the right time. You were probably just a punching bag.

Are these good lessons? Are they uplifting? Do they help me in life? Of course not. So although I am now obviously a happy, well-adjusted adult, with a career and many friends and years of happiness ahead of and behind me, I still prefer to forgot those years entirely. There is nothing positive that can come, for me, out of dredging them back up again.

No, I prefer to forget the lessons I learned, and to try to feel less cynically toward my fellow human beings. I’m an optimist, and it’s hard for me to reconcile those years spent in such a dark place with the outlook I maintain all these years later. I almost never think about that time, and if I do it’s mostly with a laugh because I’m such an entirely different person now.  But I do worry very much what will happen if I have a son or daughter that is bullied, years from now. I don’t know how I would react.  I don’t know where that would take me, in my head. Hopefully not to that dark place again. But I prefer not to go there anytime soon, especially in a casual and easy conversation with my bullies.

That’s why I won’t be interviewing my bullies after all. There are some pieces of the past worth forgetting, and I think this might be one of them.

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!

I got a Pushcart nomination! I know, I know. I’m not supposed to be excited about this. I’m supposed to be all, me and everybody else, right? But fuck that. I am always happy to have validation that someone enjoys what I do. Anyway, this one is for my story  “Five Kinds of Human History” in the latest issue of Big Lucks (thank you Mark and Laura and all!) and by the way, you can also get that issue with all its goodness for the Kindle for ONE DOLLAR. How could you pass that up? You can’t, right? Here you go.

So, there is a VERY long awaited and spectacular issue of Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens available, and I have a favorite story of mine published inside: “Death and the People.” Thank you, Bradley Sands, for publishing this weird thing. (For those of you that saw the very first ever Three Tents reading in DC, this is the story I read there.) In addition to my piece, there are stories by Laird Hunt, D. Harlan Wilson, Cameron Pierce, Amanda Billings, Kirk Jones, Andrew W. Adams, Amber Sparks, and a novella by Kirsten Alene, as well as book reviews of Steve Lowe’s Muscle Memory and Shane Jones’s A Cake Appeared. You can buy it here (and sorry but Amazon’s the only place you can get it right now!)

If you’re looking for Christmas/Hanukkah/Whatever gifts, I compiled a great list of gifts over at Vouched. If you just want to get someone the perfect new book, I compiled a list of my favorite books of 2011 over at Big Other.

I guest-edited SmokeLong Quarterly last week and you all sent me some really great stuff. Dang. So now I’m busy trying to decide which story I love the most (and this is not an easy task.)

Ravi Mangla is an awesome writer/person. So I am very happy to see that, in another really terrific decision by Uncanny Valley’s Mike Meginnis and Tracy Bowling, the press is publishing Ravi’s collection of microfictions, Visiting Writers, as an ebook. There are 23 stories in the collection, some of which have appeared in Gigantic #2, Everyday Genius, >kill author, and The Outlet.

Brand new Bright Stupid Confetti, with 50 amazing pieces. It’s–indescribably good. Just curated like honey. Check it out here.

I like what Everyday Genius is doing this month. Where they have a contributor, instead of writing down the same blabbity bla bio that no one cares about, actually point out something else that’s cool online. Good on EG. As always.

And I think a lot of American life resolves into certain versions of subculture. The people I know in rural Maine will say to me, “Not only have I never been to New York but I would never wish to go.” It’s just an inconceivable world. Well, Mainers don’t go to conventions where they wear nametags that say “I’m from Maine and my name is such-and-such.” But they are also participants in a sub-cultural identity as Mainer—specifically, this flinty, caustic, sea-salty, coastal Maine identity is a subculture. It may not have as many love beads as being a hippie, and it wouldn’t be very willing to see itself in the framework I’m proposing as analogous to MFA programs. But it’s another kind of sub-cultural choice that’s been made.

There are only subcultures, in a way, is what I’m saying, and then an idea of a whole or outside. Even “mainstream” literary authority—let’s just say, to be able to isolate more or less what we mean—the people who are routinely asked to write reviews for the New York Times Book Review and therefore, and let’s please understand that it is therefore, guaranteed that their own books will be reviewed by the New York Times Book Review, among whom I will now number myself. As hegemonic and oppressive as the assumptions that go with that, the degree to which that subculture has the privilege and utilizes the privilege of pretending there are no other literary cultures besides itself, it’s also still a subculture, where social reinforcements and tribal ritual prevail. And where a limited number of people are executing maneuvers amongst one another as though it is a whole world, but it’s not.

YES. THIS.

This is from the same dude who wrote Cloud and Other Stories, so you know it’s going to be great. Just FYI.

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.)

WEEP…to read Michael Kimball’s sad and creepy and lovely new flash, at Matter Press!

DIVE IN…to Chantel Louise Tattoli’s excellent, fascinating essay on the Little Mermaid statue and its anthropological history!

DISCOVER…interviews, articles and more, as The Lit Pub celebrates xTx’s amazing book, Normally Special!

GET PUMPED…and pre-order a book by Lauren Becker, Erin Fitzgerald, Kirsty Logan, Michelle Reale, and me called SHUT UP/LOOK PRETTY, published by Tiny Hardcore Press, the likes of which is going to rip your face off!

GASP…as you discover that you, yes, YOU, can get the brilliant Laura Ellen Scott’s new book, Death Wishing, on Kindle for exactly ZERO DOLLARS HOLY SHIT DO IT NOW.

Whew. Wipe brow. Exhale. Now go shopping.

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 order this book because holy shit is it 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.