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interview

Chaos Questions #15 – Nathaniel Tower

SHELDON LEE COMPTON: You’re in an alternate universe where instead of presents people give celebrities for Christmas. In fact, it’s not even called Christmas; it’s called Celebmas. Who do you give? Who is on your list?

NATHANIEL TOWER: Well, I think I might start by giving my wife Justin Timberlake and myself Rachel McAdams. Then we’ll all get it on together. We’ll be so busy that I’ll forget to give any celebrities to anyone else. I had planned on giving Kanye West to someone, but I left him wrapped up under the guest bed. Oh, and my dad would’ve gotten Neil deGrasse Tyson, but someone else gave him away first. So I’ll give him Rush Limbaugh two weeks after Celebmas. Oh, and I would also give that lady from Supernanny to my kids.

COMPTON: The dentist accidentally pulled three of your front teeth and you have a reading that evening. You’re ashamed and want to give them a good story about how it happened. What’s your story, you toothless wonder?

TOWER: I was curbstomped by one of those Westboro Baptist asshats in the parking lot on the way into the reading. He said something about my book being the antichrist.

COMPTON: You just discovered that all medicine is nothing more than bullshit placebos, always have been. There’s a huge chance people are going to think you’re just full on crazy, but you have to share the knowledge. What do you do?

TOWER: I head to the five nearest drug stores and buy out their entire stock of meds. I go home and take five pills a minute for the next month, filming every second of it. Then I make it into one of those time lapse videos that always go viral. The soundtrack to my video consists of Placebo’s “Song to Say Goodbye,” “Meds,” and “Bitter End.” When people see how none of that shit has any effect on me, they’ll know the truth. And Placebo will become super popular.

COMPTON: You’re in the white Bronco with O.J. speeding down the freeway. What do you say to him?

TOWER: Dude, why the fuck are we riding in a Bronco? All that money and this is the shit you’re riding in? Whatever. Let’s stop at Arby’s and get some curly fries. And can we drive a little faster maybe? I’m hungry. And how long is this gonna take? I promised my wife I’d be home by 6. Can’t piss off the wife, ya know.

May 28, 2017 0 comment

Community Conversation Fiction Literary Scene Writing

A FOLKLORE OF FICTION: An Interview with Arielle Tipa

written by Sheldon Lee Compton

SHELDON LEE COMPTON: Thanks for agreeing to talk with me, Arielle. Let’s start with how I first got to know you, through your online lit journal Fair Folk. It’s a journal that, for my money, really seeks to find the imaginative in storytelling today. Share a little about the journal and also about how did the idea for it started for you? Where do you see it going in the coming years?

ARIELLE TIPA: Fair Folk began as an “I know this has already been done before, but I’m gonna do it anyway” type of thing, since there are thousands and thousands of lit journals out there seeking out similar content. The fantasy genre has always been a favorite of mine since I was a kid, both in film and in literature. I was obsessed with series like The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper and The Unicorn Chronicles by Bruce Coville, and my favorite movies included Thumbelina and The Neverending Story. I was always that weird kid who scoured through the (pitifully small) mythology section of a Catholic school library just for fun. As I grew older, I began to question why people were so enthralled with the mystical concept of being or even existing, as well as the complexity of what it is to be human, and speculative fiction was really the only collective genre which echoed my own curiosities. Fair Folk, all in all, really stemmed from this attraction to the enchanted and the unknown, which still grows with me today.

I never had the courage to submit to literary journals until late last year, and that was very much a catalyst for developing Fair Folk – it was almost as if I wanted to do something worthwhile during my waiting period of getting a “yay” or “nay” for my lit journal submissions. To be honest, I was very insecure while starting this journal, since I really couldn’t consider myself a published writer (I really wasn’t, save for some contributive articles). But, I realized that starting Fair Folk wasn’t about me. It all boiled down to sharing diverse voices of speculative fiction, and yes, it does seek to find imaginative storytelling, which is needed now more than ever as the world today seems to sink further into a lecherous love affair with political chaos and correctness. The journal seeks out not only escapism, but a temporary alternative to reality. I believe a story is only worth reading if we are able to forget our own for just a short while, which is essentially Fair Folk’s purpose.

In the coming years, I hope to see the journal doing what it has been doing since its inception, and then some. Do I see it becoming more successful? Absolutely. Do I see it going into print? Maybe not. I have been (to an insurmountable degree) honored by having the chance to read some of the greatest spec fiction by international writers which both adheres to and shies away from the mainstream, and I cannot wait for more submissions to pile up. Being an editor-in-chief (as some will agree) is very rewarding.

COMPTON: Of course I agree that there needs to be a little more imagination in today’s fiction and poetry and, well, everything else, really. It’s a worthy goal, I think.

It’s interesting you should mention that you’re not really seeing Fair Folk becoming a print journal. In addition to the fact that realism has sort of had its day, so to speak, I also think the same can nearly be said of the print journal. I can remember hoping to get into a print publication back when I first starting writing, thinking, of course then, that it was more esteemed. I’m of a completely different mindset today. Print doesn’t begin to compete with online in terms of readership. And readership is the whole point, I believe. So Fair Folk remaining on online venue to me seems like the perfect situation. We need more of those, not less. Who needs another print journal that takes 437 days to reply to your submission and only accepts stories via snail mail. Man oh man, those days are way over in my book. What are your thoughts?

TIPA: Although I really, really prefer to read books in print, since it’s more intimate and concrete that way, my preference for literary journals is the complete opposite. Because content on the internet seems to be so much more easily accessible (and affordable) nowadays, the reason why I’d prefer the journal to stay immortalized through pixels and magical data is pretty much a no-brainer. As far as this modern, new-agey kind of era of reading, I really admire digital platforms like issuu, where you basically have the best of both worlds – a virtual print publication. I may (may) consider converting Fair Folk into virtual print and make it more like a seasonal type of publication. For now, WordPress is the easiest and most affordable option.

COMPTON: Let’s talk about your own writing. You were mentored by literary folklorist Ruth B. Bottigheimer at Stony Brook University. How did that experience bring you to the type of work you do today, especially in terms of the stories and so forth that focus on, in your own words, “fabulist to feminist, macabre to bizarre.” How much of that kind of writing did you bring to Stony Brook with you?

TIPA: To be honest, I barely even wrote anything besides scholarly papers while studying for my B.A. I was basically in starvation mode as far as writing for fun rather than for grades. I studied Comparative Literature and English, so the material I was required to read was extremely diverse: philosophical texts, cultural theories, biographies, nonfiction, sci-fi, Shakespeare, Freud, the works. While reading to get my degree, I was also, of course doing the usual – blogging, writing rough drafts, and leisure-reading on the side, and that same leisure reading included my personal favorites: fairy tales and dark fantasy, appropriately. This ultimately led to me into gathering ideas for my research project.

I ended up getting paired with this Professor Bottigheimer by the head of the Comp. Lit department and was like “Oh, cool…..who is she?” I then proceeded to Google her name at home, and basically lost it at “She has been hailed as ‘one of America’s foremost Grimm scholars’”. I became so intimidated that my anxiety was at an all-time high during the 4-month period of writing this gargantuan research project. But, meeting and working with her was rewarding. We ended up coming to an agreement for me to read and research the tales of the Grimm Brothers and Giambattista Basile, and to write a lengthy, comparative analysis of their usage of bird and tree imagery in as far as gendered functions and so on. That experience with Bottigheimer very much encouraged me to continue this obsession with writing and the fantasy genre, and to use it to the best of my abilities no matter what odd job I’m getting paid to do.

COMPTON: That is fantastic. I am now inspired to go back and read all the Grimm Brothers material. Dig deeply, you know?

So what’s coming up in the future for Arielle Tipa. What are some of you serious plans and then what are some of your pie-in-the-sky plans. For instance, my serious plans are to finish a collection of poetry and a third collection of stories by the end of the year. My fantasy plan is to retire from the day job, move to Norway, and write and play guitar for the next twenty years or so.

TIPA: Well, it’s been a while since we last have spoken, and a lot has changed in such a short period of time. I’ve been unemployed since last October, and these last six months have been some of the worst I’ve been through. But, I recently got a job as a full-time fashion and music writer for a small publication on Long Island. I love it so far, and I feel so fortunate to (finally) get paid to do what I love. I actually gained interest in fashion writing three years ago, and it became something I wanted to hone and delve deeper into. Since then, I’ve contributed for a few small sites, and I love that I get to incorporate my literary and poetic impulses into this type of journalism. This is a big leap for me and a stepping stone for my career, since I’ve wanted to work for some type of publication since community college, whether it was focused on fashion or music or any of the arts in general. Of course, I’ll still be writing poetry and short stories in-between.

As for my pet project, Fair Folk, I was recently thinking of making it into what I like to call an “inheritance” publication. That is, I would like to eventually step down as EIC and pass it down to someone I find worthy *queue villainous laughter*. Because I’m working now and have less down time, I would like to publish a few more stories and poems for Fair Folk until I feel that my time has come to an end. I’m currently tweeting updates as they come.

Lastly, I am also (as you, Mr. Compton, already know) working on a small, in-between endeavor of translating every Marilyn Manson song into Shakespearean. Seriously, like, straight-up Elizabethan stuff. Except it’s Marilyn Manson. I guess this would count as my pie-in-the-sky plan, but with the artist’s permission (followed by giddy and tearful fangirl reactions, since there is a personal, emotion connection I have with his music), I would like to publish these translations into print. Imagine that. Just imagine a printed discography of Manson’s songs bounded in tanned leather or sheepskin. If that’s not NYT #1 Bestseller material right there, then I don’t know what is.

May 2, 2017 0 comment

Conversation Literary Scene Writing

INTO THE DEEP AND INTO THE WEIRD: An Interview with Hugo Esteban Rodriguez

written by Sheldon Lee Compton

SHELDON LEE COMPTON: Really happy to have the chance to talk with you, Hugo. Thanks for taking the time. I want to start with your story “The Ritual.” I was proud as hell to get the chance to publish that at The Airgonaut the summer of last year. It tore me down in the best way possible. I knew right away I was in the hands of an extraordinary imagination. Do you mind starting with how that story took shape?

HUGO ESTEBAN RODRIGUEZ: It’s really an honor to me! I’ve always found that my fiction is a little bit weird and a little bit strange and when The Airgonaut gave me a chance I felt like I finally had that validation. On to the story! It’s really what happens when you get one particularly strong image and have it chug a whole lot of Julio Cortazar. In this case, the image was that of a diving board at a swimming pool I used to visit when I was a kid. I might have jumped from it once, but just once, and what I remember the most was how high it was, and the paint chipping off the blue metal rungs leading up to the platform. There wasn’t a diving board, either, just an elevated platform. The image stuck with me for a long time after, in a little folder in my head of random and disconnected images.

A few years ago, as a student at the UTEP’s online MFA program, I had the fortune of having Daniel Chacón as both professor and thesis advisor because he exposed me to the works of Julio Cortazar and Jorge Luis Borges and the power of magic realism, where the line between the real and the fantastical could be blurred to create the most powerful images and stories. One particular story we covered in class sticks out: Cortazar’s La autopista del sur. What Cortazar does with the concept of time and place in that story basically told me: “You want to get weird? Let’s get weird.”

So I wrote an entire manuscript with those ideas, with my heart set on releasing a book that would put me in a literary space somewhere between Raymond Carver, Neil Gaiman, and Sandra Cisneros. But The Ritual, for all its weirdness, didn’t feel like it belonged there. Once I made the edits to the manuscript, it was the first story removed. Coincidentally, the second story removed from the manuscript eventually became This Nocturne of Misplaced Questions, published by The Airgonaut earlier this year.

But on to “The Ritual” even after I had made some more edits free from the constraint of continuity or of the manuscript, something was not quite there. It wasn’t until I heeded the call for submissions from The Airgonaut that I realized what my problem with the story was. It wasn’t what I wasn’t saying, but rather what I was saying, and using the sharp 1,000-word cut-off requirement, I took a scalpel and removed all the excess fat from the story, resulting in what you see now. My belief with “The Ritual” was that there should be an emphasis on the real part of magic realism, where there was more creativity invested in writing something concrete than in something ethereal, vague, and abstract.

To sum it up “The Ritual” came about as a vivid image frozen in time bolstered by learning about magic realism and then using a scalpel to remove unnecessary detail in a weird story that’s both an ode to the Latino greats that influenced me and an introduction letter to the literary world broadcasting that I’m going to bring the weirdness.

COMPTON: I like that – an introduction letter. It has the feel of a story that is announcing something important, the arrival of a genuine storyteller. You mention some of the Latino influences such as Borges (who I’ve read extensively) and Cortazar (who I have not read at all, as of yet). I wonder when writing in proximity to these huge shadows of magical realism and innovation how does a writer manage to create his own voice and his own style, and so on? It’s clearly something you’ve managed to do very well. I only wonder was there a great deal of effort that went into it or were you able to open up in original ways without much problem?

RODRIGUEZ: I have kind of a simple view on things like that. I don’t see it as daunting or intimidating. I see what’s been done by people like those two and I think to myself: “Wow, that’s really cool! Now how can I do something like that with my own twist?”

It goes beyond those writers I mentioned and extends to poets and journalists and songwriters and what they’re able to do with words. That’s what inspires me and gives me the fuel to figure out the how to make my voice unique. And to answer that question, I think I benefit from an outsider’s approach. I only started writing literary fiction in 2013 and then only because it was part of my Advanced Fiction Writing workshop. Before that, the bulk of my writing experience came from six semesters as a journalist for my alma mater, angsty online journals, and writing bad genre fiction and even worse fanfiction. So you take that and then you add the fact that my main social circle isn’t writers or poets but rather accountants, engineers, IT professionals, and teachers and you get a guy who has no idea what rules and norms The Literary Establishment™ has set and decides to instead carve out his own place. That comes easy to me. The effort and the real fun*, I think, comes from the trial-and-error figuring out which inspiration will work with which weird/vivid imagery. I compare this to cooking, another hobby I go into with the same reckless abandon. Sometimes the idea will work, like the years-long process that’s helped me develop the best gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches. Sometimes the idea will crash and burn spectacularly, like the time I thought adding marinara sauce to ramen would be a good idea.

It wasn’t, and the effort resulted in the next two hours being spent in complete misery, but it was still fun attempting it.

*writers have quite the masochistic view of fun.

COMPTON: You say angsty online journals. I feel like I can relate. An online journal should be the rebel torch in the literary darkness right now, I think. Not a throw-away jumble of hasty ideas spread all over the place. Can you expand on what you mean and also share your thoughts on online work in general, especially as opposed to the increasingly uptight world of print?

RODRIGUEZ: Oh, to clarify, I meant angsty online personal journal sites, such as Xanga. However, there is one thing in common that those monuments to my teenage angst have with stories I’ve seen published: self-serving, navel-gazing bullshit. Not that there isn’t great work out there, because there is, plenty of it, but I feel like it gets buried in mountains of stories about sad people feeling sad about sad things.

Last year, I briefly worked as an assistant editor for the literary magazine Bartleby Snopes and one of the things that I loved the most about it, besides the fantastic people I got to work with, was that they weren’t afraid to push into the weird to get awesomely engaging stories. Editor Nate Tower had set a few submission guidelines for things that we would be wary of: “Stories written in present tense (especially third person present tense); stories with graphic dead baby scenes; stories about writers; stories about struggling marriages; stories set in bars; stories with more backstory than plot; stories with undeveloped characters; stories that are overly reflective; and stories that rely heavily on second person usage.”

It didn’t mean we weren’t going to publish stories that had some of those things, it just meant that writers should take risks and Bartleby was going to do its best to take away as many crutches as they could from those who submitted. That’s how the final issue’s dialogue contest winners included stories-in-dialogue about: a Godzilla-like monster who recited haikus; two men talking about pillows; two AIs talking at a bar; and one about a store receiving magical unicorn polish. I repeat: Bartleby Snopes was not a genre magazine, but it was a magazine that wasn’t afraid to get weird.

I’m a traditionalist in the sense that I prefer to work within rather than without the Literary Establishment™ to change things. Why? Because a lot of the criticism levied against it is completely valid. One of the biggest problems is the one you mentioned: We’re very uptight. We don’t want to mess with what’s established. We don’t want to take risks. We don’t want to try and take notes from the indie crowd when it comes to building up market. We act as if being able to interpret Joyce and loving the classics is the only way to enter this rarified air.

(And all of this just gives more ammo to those in the indie community who then claim we’re some sort of exclusive country club)

But these are not lofty spaces. What we do is really no different than what anyone with a passion/talent does. Success shouldn’t be defined by what you publish, awards, conferences, tenures, it should be defined by the simplest question: “Are you happy?”

And not in the blissful, okay-we-are-done-no-more-effort-required sense of happiness that’s fatal, but rather, the happiness, or rather, the satisfaction of knowing that what you do is what you want to do. That’s success. Y’all think some of these best-selling and allegedly “hack” writers give two shits that some stuffy professor with an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop thinks? They enjoy what they do.

That’s success. I consider myself successful because I get to do what I like to do on the side, but success comes with a huge side helping of hunger. There are still a lot of things I want to do and am able to do and I’m just getting started. I can’t stop. My grandfather once wrote to me: “Venado que se para, lo flechan.” (The deer that stays still gets killed)

And maybe, maybe part of it is that I just don’t “get it” and it would make sense. I’ve hated most of the classics I’ve read, I didn’t study literary theory until my master’s, got a C in the last proper English class I took in undergrad, and but for a few exceptions didn’t really like the rest of my English classes. There are things I still don’t like about the approaches: such as how anything published online is automatically considered published. Sure, Sturgeon’s Law applies but it’s also a good way to grow your market versus having to order a book that even with the author’s discount comes out to $10 if you want to show someone what you’ve written. (Don’t even get me started on submission fees)

But, to be fair, that uptightness extends to those levying that criticism against the Establishment, too. Writers who can’t take criticism at all. I have seen people say, and I’m paraphrasing only a bit: “Oh I had a story that got turned down by an editor therefore all gatekeepers are snobs. I am just going to throw a few words on CreateSpace and show it to people who’ll blow smoke up my ass and flip my shit when someone gives me three stars or less on my review.”

You have to have thick skin as a writer. You’re going to get rejection after rejection. That’s good! The first one’s always a little bit jarring but after that, they get much easier. The mentality should be that rejections are the expectation and not the exception. Eventually you start wanting to get rejections because you know every rejection is an opportunity to fix something and you know that in the end it’s a numbers game. Writers need to be able to handle that. Before I landed a book deal with La Casita Grande Editores, I had emailed around 60 different queries to 60 different agents. A year from now, I won’t necessarily remember the 60 queries or that of those, only 10 agents responded, with 9 of those being a variant of “thanks but no thanks” and one “wow sounds interesting, and thanks but no thanks”. I will remember that out of a hell of a lot of nos, I had one yes. That’s all that mattered.

This, by the way, is not a dig at the agents that turned me down. If anything, I’m thankful, because that’s 60 different look-throughs and edits that improved my queries each time. And as a Latino writer, I felt that it was my responsibility to go this way, because there is another very valid criticism about the establishment: it’s too white. You don’t see a lot of us in this space of literary journals and MFA programs. So I have to challenge my fellow POC writers who are tempted to go indie to not give up on their dreams of getting published the “traditional” way for the sole reason that by retreating we give the people who don’t want to see us there win by giving them exactly what they want.

If doors are closed, you kick them open. If they won’t budge, you open a window, if the window’s closed, you find another way in. If the space is too white, what is gained by leaving? How are you going to change the system when you can’t get traction at all? I may be just one person, but I’m there. I’m there because I saw other Latino writers and poets stirring up shit inside those literary spaces. My hope is I am able to do the same for even younger POC writers. As one friend put it: We should infiltrate, not segregate. Get your name out there, start a blog, go to events, change the system from within. I think online journals are a great way to start because it puts your story out there, one that’s vetted. Don’t hide behind paywalls. Get your work out there because people need to see it.

COMPTON: Oh man I love your views on all this. I think what you just said should be put in chapbook form and handed out to all young writers at some point in their lives, like a driver’s license, like a class ring, like a diploma.

So what’s on tap for you? What’s the realistic, day to day, version of what’s next and then what would be the next thing if you had a magic wand and could just make it happen instantly? In particular, do you have anything in book form that you might be shopping around in the near future?

RODRIGUEZ: Right now, I’m finishing up the edits to my manuscript and my editor and I are hoping for publication by February of next year, with as many readings and appearances to promote it as I can get in the fall. On the individual level, I’ll do a lot of self-promotion but I’ll do my best to be mindful not to cross over into the “we get it, Hugo, you wrote a book” point. I also don’t want to be that guy on Twitter only posting links to his book because that’s going to get old and annoying real quick. However, I’m still going to be active in my social media presence. I’m mostly on Twitter @HugoEstebanRC and Facebook (www.facebook.com/DosAguilasWrites) and I post a weekly writing-related (mostly) post on my John Scalzi/Chuck Wendig-inspired blog at www.dosaguilas.org/random-strands.

What kind of stuff are you going to see there? Well, writing-related stuff, nonsensical musings about food, the occasional retweet of something political, and words of praise for heavy metal and the San Antonio Spurs.

On the other writing fronts…oh man, lots of writing ahead! I’m going to keep on writing short stories and flash pieces; I’m going to finish the edits to my poetry manuscript and start shopping that around; and finally, well, I really want to start making serious inroads into the fantasy epic that I’ve been developing over the last decade and change.

If the magic wand only applies to me and only my writing, I’d probably use it on having that genre project off the ground and at the very least having a manuscript I could start querying agents with. Like I said, it’s been about eleven years since I first came up with the original idea, and I have nothing to show for it. I’ve started to write something several times and gotten as far as 70 pages in before letting the crippling self-doubt get to me and forcing me to abandon the projects because they’re burning piles of garbage. If anyone were to read them right now I’d want them to sign a medical waiver; that way they wouldn’t have grounds to sue me after the neck injuries they’d sustain from cringing so hard.

But honestly? I want to get better, and I know I really need to just devote more time to actually getting better, devoting time to the process that I love, with all its highs and its lows. If I were to flick my wrist and poof I have a completed and non-cringy manuscript…it’d rob me of all of that, so…it’d be a really tough call.

That’s really pretty much it. I want to thank you so much for your time, and for any one interested in getting to know more, please feel free to reach out to me! I love talking to people about writing, and really, anything.

April 28, 2017 0 comment

Conversation Poetry

INTERVIEW: Rusty Barnes Invites Readers to Revere in New Poetry Collection

written by Sheldon Lee Compton

SHELDON LEE COMPTON: I’m going to be honest here: I’ve always thought of you, firstly, as a poet. You just hold a line so well and have just amazing instincts with a phrase. Where does “Rusty Barnes the poet” fit into your idea of yourself and your work?

RUSTY BARNES: I began writing as a poet and that’s still how I think of myself. It looks like I write a ton more fiction than I do poetry, but that’s because the poems come between longer fiction projects. Whenever I cool off or finish something long, the poems start to come, and I write them for as long as the Muse will hang out with me, then start another novel or novella. It rounds out to writing poems three months a year and two or three novel(las) a year. This is how it’s worked for the past three years anyway. I’m in a holding pattern—this one is requiring a lot of research—with my current novel, and it feels weird not to be writing poems, but I trust everything will even out pretty soon. It usually does.

SLC: On Broad Sound is, I think, some of your best poetry. In particular, the poem “Lamp” speaks most clearly about your adoptive frame of mind in Revere. How long have you lived in Revere and what was the timeline for writing the poems in this collection?

RB: I lived first in East Boston, then moved to Revere–a move of only a half-mile or so–17 or 18 years ago. With one or two exceptions, the poems were all written in 2015 and 2016. I run in spurts. I usually take a break from fiction and write poems twice a year or so.

SLC: Do you have a favorite poem in On Broad Sound? One that stands out for you? If so, what’s the story behind that piece?

RB: I do have a favorite. My wife and I have been together for 26 years and I’ve never quite captured the dynamic of our relationship or said the things I want to say about how much I value her as friend and lover and go-to for basically everything in my life. She’s my first reader for all my poems. Sometimes we sit across from each other or move to our various places on the couch and email drafts back and forth for a couple hours a night after the kids have gone to bed. During one of those sessions came the last poem in the book, “The View from Earth,” the first poem where I thought I might have captured those feelings which usually stay unsaid. So yeah.

SLC: I love that, man. I just reread the poem. It’s one I had bookmarked as a favorite. It’s a piece that honestly does seem to pour out emotion, like an actual stream of total love, devotion, and sort of an awe for the subject matter, your wife Heather in this case, of course. It’s beautiful, Rusty. It seriously is.

After reading this collection, I’m now going to have to visit Revere, Mass. You make me want to move and take up a residence there, visit the local restaurants, stand on the shore. It’s as if you infused these poems with a hint of how it must feel to live there and raise a family there and build up years with a woman who fills up your heart. I’ve known you now for more than a decade and have thought of you in many ways as a regional writer. Do you have the feeling you’ll revisit Revere as a locale or inspiration?

RB: Thanks Shel. You can come up and visit anytime. I’ll take you to the SeaWitch and we’ll grub out on some fine fresh seafood. I hope I’ve captured something of what it is about Revere I like. It’s working-class and immigrant-rich still, but slowly gentrifying, which is a mixed bag. Still, within 20 minutes–a short subway ride– you can be downtown amidst all the culture you’d ever want. There are readings almost every night if you want to do that, great restaurants and a cool indie scene in general. For us, it’s perfect.

I will revisit Revere. In fact, I have already. My next big project coming out is Knuckledragger, from Shotgun Honey/Down & Out Books (October 2017) which takes place in Revere and surrounding towns, a book about a low-level Irish-type enforcer’s life, how he juggles his job and his women and gets in way over his head. I’m looking forward to seeing how folks like that, or whether readers will take to it knowing my past publication history, which is regional, as you say.

SLC: The SeaWitch and crashing a couple solid readings must be done. I remember telling you maybe a year or so ago that I had this vivid dream where I ended up at your house and, for some unknown reason, needed to crash there for awhile. You and Heather and the kids were awesome and took me in like family. I think I’m destined to visit Revere and hang with the Barnes family. And, of course, if you’re ever in spitting distance of Horseshoe Drive, you all need to stay for a bit on the farm. We’ll burn garbage and eat grilled ribs, just like good southern folk.

With mention of Shotgun Honey/Down & Out Books and the focus here on On Broad Sound, I have to wonder if you’ll ever wed those two sides of your writing life – the poet and the crime writer. I know you’ve been laying down a mighty amount of pages and cranking out several crime/thriller titles, such as Ridgerunner (which was solid as all hell) and the upcoming Knuckledragger (which I’m sure will be the same) but, like you said, you keep poetry there in the foreground with you. Can we expect a crime poetry collection in the future? And wouldn’t that be something that hasn’t been done before? Maybe ever?

RB: I’d love to get down to Horseshoe Drive. Someday. . .

I honestly have never thought of a crime poetry collection. This is what I know about crime poetry from my contemporaries though. Tony Barnstone wrote a very good book called Pulp Sonnets, which doesn’t quite match up with crime poetry but is, as the title suggests, full of love for pulp fiction and movies of all kinds. Also, my friend, the poet Joshua Michael Stewart–you may know him from Facebook–has had a book of very good noir poems in progress for some time. I’ve read some of them and published a couple in Fried Chicken and Coffee. The Lineup: Poems on Crime, cofounded by another Facebook friend, Patrick Shawn Bagley, is a small anthology that’s still available. I imagine there’s still a market for something like that, albeit limited. You may have just found me my next poetry project, Shel!

As for questions I wish you’d asked. . .I dunno. Now, I’ve got ideas for a bunch of crime poems, though, and I want to thank you for putting that idea in my ear and for doing this interview. Always nice to chat with one of the good ones.

SLC: Same to you, Rusty. Thanks for talking, and keep me updated on that collection!

Purchase ON BROAD SOUND.

Find out more about Nixes Mate Press.

* * *

RUSTY BARNES grew up in rural northern Appalachia. He received his B.A. from Mansfield University of Pennsylvania and his M.F.A. from Emerson College. His fiction, poetry and non-fiction have appeared in over two hundred journals and anthologies. After editing fiction for the Beacon Street Review (now Redivider) and Zoetrope All-Story Extra, he co-founded Night Train, a literary journal which was featured in the Boston Globe, The New York Times, and on National Public Radio, ending its ten-year-run in February 2012, relaunching in 2014 long enough to do a best of anthology and one new print issue, ending its run (again) in 2015. Sunnyoutside Press published two collections of fiction, Breaking it Down and Mostly Redneck. MiPOesias published two chapbooks of poetry, Redneck Poems and Broke. Cruel Joke Press published his poetry collection, I Am Not Ariel in November 2013. Sunnyoutside Press published his novel, Reckoning, in March 2014. Ridgerunner, a crime novel, came out in May 2016 from 280 Steps. A follow-up to Ridgerunner, The Last Danger, will be published in Winter 2017. Also in 2017, Ravenwood Quarterly will publish a novel-in-stories titled Kraj: the Enforcer. His new poetry collection, On Broad Sound, is now available from Nixes Mate Press. His flash fiction appears in Best Small Fictions 2015, edited by Tara Masih and Robert Olen Butler.

March 24, 2017 2 comments

Conversation

Chaos Questions #3 – xTx

written by Sheldon Lee Compton

SHELDON LEE COMPTON: You move to Montana to get away from it all. Turns out Ted Kaczynski, the one and only Unabomber, is your neighbor. He comes over the second night you’re there and confesses his twisted plans. What do you do?

pot-doctor

xTx: With Ted there is a warm ringing and we embrace like brothers begging before our brutal step-father. This, after our hands were writhed. A progression of understanding, compassion and love that knit the evening. His beard I breathed. This, after I shaped his jaw with my palms. A mandible meaty and wide. Strong. The beard a white cloth covering a David. It was hours I listened. The pour of wine deep between us. It was not minutes it came to that, it was one decade.

I moved to Montana a ten years-lonely woman who wanted to die underneath a sky I would never deserve. The shame in that heating my loins. When Ted appeared on my doorstep, madness in his gaze, I clung to him like a bundle of rebar thrown into a very deep lake. A quick and easy way to go down.

No one will ever know Ted the way I did. The mushroom-smell of his hair. The way he’d hitch and Gollum-sputter nonsense sounds in between monologues. How he agreed to a promise he eventually kept. How, these years later, I still keep that promise, metal-tubed and ticking underneath my mattress, Ted-set for a day he doesn’t want me to wake up. I often wonder if it will be the same day of his not waking.

I often pray for that.

SLC: Tomorrow you show up for work and the whole damn place, the entire building, is gone. There’s a note in the place you used to park that reads, “They know.” Walk me through the rest of your day.

xTx: 1. I say, “Oh shit” and get back in my car.

2. I drive to Venice Beach.

3. I find one of those “Pot Doctor” places and pay $50 for an exam so I can get a “Pot Card.”

4. I walk around without an iPhone until I find a Pot Store.

5. I go in to the Pot Store and buy pot in the shape of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.

6. I ask the Pot Store Guy if he knows what they know and he nods and hands me an envelope.

7. I leave the store and open the envelope after I eat the Pot Reese’s.

8. I start every sentence in this thing with I.

9. I find a feather smeared with feces inside the envelope.

10. I get mad at the Pot Guy because I realize he did not know what they know.

11. I drive back to where my work was.

12. I lie down in the parking lot and make snow angels against the asphalt that has no snow until my clothes wear through and my skins rubs off exposing my yellow fat and muscles and eventually bone.

13. I die.

14. I know.

SLC: The 1980s or the 1990s? Let’s talk about that.

xTx: Let’s not. But, the 80’s man……

SLC: Fifty percent of the U.S. population can manipulate one of the four basic elements. You’re among that percentage. Which element, and what will you do?

xTx: I’m not sure what elements are and I’m not going to Google it so I can just write whatever I want to write on this question.

I’m going to guess that elements are things like rain and the waves of the ocean and how those new-fangled kitchen drawers stop a half-inch from closing all the way and then slooooowly close all the way shut. I didn’t go to college so hopefully that helps explain my guess if I am, like, way far off.

So, taking the path of my guess, I’m going to say that I would probably manipulate something really small and stupid because I’m sure all of the other people picked all the cool elements (like tidal waves, Beyonce and fire smoke) and are all acting like they are bad-ass while actually they are just a bunch of sheep. So, I will pick the element of the slam dunk. I will make bets on basketball games and then control all the basketballs to be slam dunks in my favor so I will win lots of money. I will also use my powers to blow men’s minds at various playgrounds, gyms and recreation facilities all across the land. Especially at those courts in Venice Beach where they filmed White Men Can’t Jump. Man, I will fuck their shit UP over there!

SLC: Ants and humans switch size but retain their intelligence. What the hell do you do first?

xTx: Get out of the way of the ants.

November 26, 2016 0 comment

\m/ New Hotness \m/Announcement Literary Scene Random

Interview with Alexandra Naughton

written by Jeremy Hight

JH: What made you want to become a writer?

AN: I have always been writing. Since I was like 4 years old I have always been making up songs or writing poems and stories and putting on shows for people or imaginary friends. When I was a baby my parents put a video camera in my bedroom for an afternoon and called the video ‘Allie takes a nap.’ It’s basically an hour of me mugging for the camera and walking around in my crib and singing to myself.

I don’t think it’s something I ever really decided to do, I’ve just been doing it. Something like ten years ago I started to take this shit a bit more seriously and got more involved in getting my work published and doing readings, but honestly it all feels like a compulsion. I wrote about this feeling of being compelled to write a while ago on htmlgiant and someone commented saying ‘you’re not a writer, you have an addiction.’ And that’s chill and all. Not everyone can be like me.

September 14, 2015 1 comment

Community

a post about AWP I meant to post but got TOO CAUGHT UP

written by Alexandra Naughton

Okay so I’m back in sunny ass Berkeley sitting at my desk at my high-pressure job eating a tuna melt that was not thoroughly melted and looking out the window at some palm trees and thinking about all the cool shit I did at AWP this past weekend and trying to process it all. It takes me a long time to process things. This will probably be the first of several posts about AWP that I will make here.

Janice and Michael asked if I would write posts about AWP while at AWP and I meant to but honestly I was having too much fun running around with a sick posse of writers who I love going to readings and doing performances and seeing the sights in Minneapolis and basically just taking advantage of what I felt was like a vacation that I never got the chance. I meant to, though, I really did.

I’ve got a lot to say. I’m not sure how to say it yet, but I will eventually.

At this moment, I guess I just want to give a shoutout and a huge thanks to A. Razor of Punk Hostage Press and Jason Scheinheit of The Gorilla Press for working the book table and trying to get our wares out there. They both deserve a well-toasted tuna melt (or a well-toasted sandwich of their choice).

Also, I want to share these cool podcasts Jason conducted while working the table. The podcasts are all about five minutes long or fewer and are pretty funny. Jason interviewed me, as well as Amy Saul-Zerby, Jesse Prado, A. Razor, Tomas Moniz, Lizzie Acker, Hollie Hardy, Nate Waggoner, Russell Jaffe, Oliver Mol, and others. Check em out! They are short and sweet!

April 14, 2015 0 comment

Art Conversation Random

photos and theft: interview with Bay Area photographer Joe Carrow

written by Alexandra Naughton

Joe Carrow is a cool guy who comes to a lot of the readings in the Bay Area and takes photographs of local weirdos and does it all for the love of it. In this interview we talk about his photo work and an incident he had with a Canadian website and I pretend that I’m not sure who I’m talking to at first for a pathetic attempt at comedy.

Hey, so first question: who are you, what do you do, and how do we know each other?

Hi Alexandra!

I’m Joe Carrow. I work as a mechanical engineer by day, and I do more creative things at night to stay sane. I used to play drums before I moved to the Bay area in 2004, but when I got out here I found that all of the apartments were really tiny and I didn’t have a way to keep playing. I loved drums, but my girlfriend at the time needed floor space for her wheelchair and the apartment walls were too thin for so much noise. I started getting pretty serious about photography around 2008, and in 2012 I became the show photographer for Oakland Nights Live.

I was invited to take some pictures at a poetry reading in an abandoned apartment in 2012, where I met you and a few other local poets. I put out a Facebook call of “Who wants to do a shoot?” in 2013 and you wanted to do a shoot, and we’ve been doing photo stuff and going to each others events ever since.

Ah, yeah. I’m remembering now. We did a photo shoot. You’re the guy with the beard holding a camera, right? Yeah, I think you’ve shot the covers for a few of my books or something. What kind of photo work do you like to do? What do you find inspiring?

That’s right! I’m the guy with the beard and camera. I was pursuing competitive beard growth for a while, but eventually it felt ridiculous and I trimmed it off.

The kind of photo work that I like to do is to show people having cool experiences. Really, it’s the look on somebody’s face that does it for me. What’s going on? What are they up to? Who are they? Is something cool happening? I can appreciate and enjoy pictures of landscapes and skies and inanimate objects as well, but I care a lot more about people pictures. I like to catch those candid moments when people aren’t posing, when they’re having a genuine moment. Here are a few favorites:

March 24, 2015 1 comment