And sometimes you have to pack up both of your roommates – Danny the gay singer-songwriter from a Mormon Army family in Utah who looked and sounded like Elton John; and Jay, the CrackerBaller, the white Tupac / King Diamond expert in the mail-order KOOL baseball jersey who said he was from Detroit but was really from Sterling Heights – and go to the 99 Joints album release party in some gutterflat in Allston. Here you proceed to meet some new people, you see that cellist you think is really hot, and then, somehow, you end up dancing on a kitchen island to “The Big Payback” by James Brown at 3 in the morning, all the hours since midnight a black blur.
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(I don’t normally write poetry that a) rhymes; and b) isn’t funny. Here is an example of a poem that breaks both rules.) Frayed bends of pages shuffle from between the ends of ages: a notebook, seen through many years of a young man’s life; While you shifted gears from girlfriend to wife and watched …
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I have been collecting literary / writing contests lately, and most of them are pretty cut and dried: type, style, genre, word count, deadline, etc. You do occasionally find something very interesting, though. Geist is a good book, and they have launched an example of such a contest: The Geist Fortune Cookie Contest First Prize: …
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(Written in 2008) What the hands want, the heart desires until the sun sets and the moon retires. Why the fuck am I at Wal-Mart on Easter Sunday?
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Part of being a professional writer is being rejected. I thought it would be informative to show you what things I’ve submitted that get passed on for publication and to tell you why, if the editor was kind of enough to let me know. This was my first ever submission to McSweeney’s which, as literary …
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The Street View in this google maps treatment of the house where I grew up is clearer than the picture I have my mind.
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You would think from the title that this would be some sort of update about my WRITER’S BRAIN and how I am caring for and feeding it lately, now that I am publishing as a freelancer and writing book proposals and getting myself out there in a way that I think is successful. It is? …
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