Gang Related

Not the best kept secret in the world, but I'm collaborating on a slash project with Lana Turner, Claudine Longet, and Jean Harris. Possible drafty by AWP time, so look out world. Sliterature!

(actually we're still only in the gossip stage)

Well hello there

Prick of the Spindle 4.3 is live

Go here for this season's gallery of fun. 4.3 marks my second full issue as Fiction Editor, and I'm getting into the groove now. The biggest challenge had been how to deal with "friend" submissions, but now I'm over that. The sheer volume of subs + having a life makes it impossible to treat every special baby like a special baby, and luckily our reading process leaves plenty of room for me to deny influence.

I did struggle with the reviews I wrote for this issue, and I think it shows. I wasn't crazy about the books, and I kept having to re-define my purpose. I think my deal is to try to reveal enough about the writing that my opinion can be tossed if it gets in the way.

Storytime! for cats and tots

The party boys of Barrelhouse hosted a reading of Moon Milk Review writers last night in DC, and it was great fun.Very well attended and I finally picked up Molly Gaudry's verse novella We Take Me Apart, as well as the latest issue of Barrelhouse (#8, "Office Life"), which I'd been resisting out of petulance. I failed to convince Dan Brady that they should use the cover art for issue 7 as their permanent profile image.

I'm not sure if this was her first reading, but my 2 & 1/2 year old gosh daughter (fave quote from dinner: "Oh yeah, remind me to get you a copy of the will") squirmed quietly and charmingly during the first set of readers which included Randall Brown. She really likes the clapping part. After she and her folks cut out at half-time, several people commented on how good she was--and she was very good--but just minutes earlier we were chasing her through a restaurant, trying to stop her from running out into the street with about four twenty dollar bills she managed to snatch from the cash machine.

This morning I woke up to find that the gorgeous card that Rae Bryant distributed to promote the latest MMR issue had been mauled by Harriet. She loves Ben Loory, is my guess.

Can we write off our booze to Smokelong and Prick of the Spindle?

This reading is at the Black Squirrel tomorrow night, same location as the Smokelong/Corium/Prick of the Spindle AWP offsite reading in Feb 2011. Tara Laskowski and I feel duty bound to check it out. Thoroughly. We even lined up drivers so we can get ripped.

A Howling in the Wires: An Anthology of Writing from Postdiluvian New Orleans

This afternoon I just received my copy of A Howling in the Wires a collection mostly just-after-or around-Katrina writings edited by Sam Jasper and Mark Folse, published Gallatin & Toulouse Press. As of this posting I'm about a quarter of the way through, and I'm buzzing with the awful vitality of the volume. I learned about the collection from a facebook posting by an old friend, Greg Peters (frenemy? the man can wear the hell out of a leather kilt, but he once told me he hated me when I was funnier than he was, which had to be a tough way for him to live). Greg's got the first two entries, and entries is the right term for the pieces range wildly from literary to journalistic to emergency bulletin style, deliberately unpolished to retain the immediacy of their original expression--that decision was GENIUS, btw. Anyway, the book has my neck hairs rising. I'm serious. So far Howling is both rough and sentimental, sitting somewhere between Robert Smallwood's ragged, good, but is-it-completely-honest? The Five People You Meet in Hell:Surviving Katrina and David Eggars' mournful and smoothly crafted Zeitoun.

Shit, I even like the poetry.

More soon.

the dog ate my book report. the dog will starve

So writing reviews is pretty damn hard. Not quite as hard as writing a query letter, but still. My eyes actually go blurry as I try to craft the simplest phrasing, which strikes me as a symptom. Someone I respect said, somewhere, that the content of reviews is unimportant to the sale of the book. But who was it,and where did they say this? Did I dream it? I hope not, because I just told my class that it was the truth.

High class AWP off site readings!

Your Thursday and Friday nights are spoken for