We had our place burglarized, and while I’m pretty good at backing everything up, I did not back up my submissions record.
This is a preemptive apology to every journal if I accidentally submit multiple pieces or if I don’t withdraw a piece I submitted once it’s accepted somewhere – I’m really sorry!
Favorite poetry things I read in the past week:
Book of Poetry
Source to Mouth by Brandon Krieg. I know it’s a chapbook, technically speaking, but it’s 48 pages long, which is pretty book-ish. Here Krieg deals with the poisonous expanses of Western Imperialism. The speaker tries desperately to engage with the non-human natural world, but can only speak to it through the grime of Empire. It’s a beautiful book that balances equal parts laurel and spear.
Poem in a Journal
“Branding” by Eleanor Wilner from The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review #38. Nations are becoming more like sports teams or products, there’s not much more terrible and poetic than that.
Favorite poetry I read over the past week.
Book of Poetry
Tocqueville by Khaled Mattawa. I’m sorry this sat so long on my shelf (PhD, etc). Really terrific exploration of how we in America process the violence and social excess of the past decade. (Spoiler – not “well”).
Poem in a Journal
“Saturday-night Dream” by Kat Sanchez from Columbia Poetry Review #26. Dreams are tough material but they can also fuck us up mentally as much as anything.
(This is all written by the great poet Brian Russell, author of the forthcoming book The Year Of What Now, available from Graywolf in a few too-long months)
THE NEXT BIG THING
Many many thanks to the fantastic Kelly Forsythe for tagging me in “The Next Big Thing” thing. Head here to learn about Kelly’s book-to-be, Colorado Perennial. Thanks, too, to Glenn for letting me post these answers on his blog as I’m blogless.
What is the working title of the book?
The Year of What Now
What genre does your book fall under?
Poetry
What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
Wife: Naomi Watts or Julianne Moore
Husband: Philip Seymour Hoffman
Doctors: Viola Davis, Chris Cooper, Terrence Howard, Angelica Houston
What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?
After a woman falls suddenly ill, doctors struggle to figure out what’s wrong with her and her husband confronts the unimaginable possibility of life without her.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
Six months. At the beginning of 2011 I knew I wanted to write this book. While I didn’t have a lot of the details sorted out yet, the general arc and most of the major scenes and ideas were there, and I was incredibly impatient to get it finished. I wanted it to be ready to send out for the fall first book prize deadlines. I figured I needed to write 90 poems with the idea that about 55-60 of them would survive. Giving myself two months to edit and arrange the collection, that left me with six months to write it. I wrote the first poem on February 1st and the 90th on July 31st. Coincidentally, neither of them made the cut.
Where did you get the idea for the book / Who or what inspired you to write this book?
The book is based on a series of things that happened that forced me to spend much more time than I’d like in a hospital. I’ve always been both, if not equally, terrified and fascinated by hospitals. A place where every day wonderful and terrible things are happening simultaneously. A place where life-altering and mundane exist side by side. The events that led me to spend an extended period of time in the hospital became the starting point for the book, though it is by no means a memoir-in-verse. I look at the wife and husband in the book as homages to, as embodiments of, people I love who have endured more than they should have to.
What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
One poem begins with a joke I made up. One poem is about a parasite that gets into rats and erases their fear of cats. In one poem, you can learn a little bit about the evolution of gasoline use. The hospital as parallel universe. A little rhyme. Some dialogue. A good deal of misdirected anger. Hopelessness. Hope. Love.
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
Graywolf will publish my book in July. While we’re on the subject…it’s always interesting, when people who don’t read poetry find out you’re publishing a book of poetry, to field their follow-up questions, such as: so what you’re saying is the book is just, like, a ton of poems (well it depends how you define “a ton”)? Is it a children’s book (no)? Do you mean they’re, like, stories about poems (huh?)?
My tagged writers for next Wednesday are:
Christopher Ankney
Paul Otremba
My chapbook of flash fiction, Unchecked Savagery, is now available from Ricochet Editions. Only one sawbuck, so click on that link! Here’s the cover, designed by Scott Massey:
“These miniature worlds celebrate the strange and the ordinary, burger shacks and full moons and a woman who has a crisis of faith over Soul Train. Glenn Shaheen blends the laugh-out-loud funny with a wistful wisdom so cutting you might feel a little bad that you laughed. ‘What children we are of disappointment and luxury,’ a character tells us, and the reader nods: disappointment in ourselves or our lovers or Soul Train, maybe, but never a moment of disappointment in these stories.”
Hey all! Last week I did that self-interview thing, so here’s another in that chain of questions by one Andrew Brininstool. He doesn’t have a blog himself so I offered to let him use some of my 10 gigs of space that I for some reason pay for. Here it is!
What is your working title of your story?
“Big Eyes, Wide Smiles,” from a collection of stories.
Where did the idea come from for the story?
See: Question Eight.
What genre does your story fall under?
Mainstream Fiction Literary Fiction.
Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
Blimey. I’m not sure about this one. James Spader and The Latest Hot Commodity Actress. Clearly, I don’t watch enough films. Do we call them films anymore?
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your story?
A maxillofacial surgeon and a sadistic beauty queen run away together.
Where will your story be published?
The incomparable Third Coast, a literary journal out of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, MI.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
Months for the first draft. An entire summer, I believe. And another year of keeping at it.
What other stories would you compare this story to within your genre?
Let’s say “Me and Miss Mandible” meets “Rock Springs.”
Who or what inspired you to write this story?
There are a number of sources for this piece. One is Sam Smadi, an alleged teenage terrorist who planned to lay ruin Fountain Place, a skyscraper in downtown Dallas. “Big Eyes, Wide Smiles” isn’t about terrorism, but the details in the Smadi case were, to my mind, fascinating in a cultural funhouse sort of way.
Count the signifying red flags: A religious fanatic plans to blow up a large building while living in a small town named Italy, Texas, where he works at BBQ joint connected to a gas station and resides in a housing complex comprised of individual domes that, collectively, look like a caterpillar. (Here is a picture: http://c541658.r58.cf2.rackcdn.com/vault/img/2011/05/10/4dc92b8ac29e068473000ba9/medium_mediabruco.jpg)
You cannot make this kind of thing up, but maybe you can come close. I started throwing together dissonant images, notions. A beauty queen, a surgeon. A motel in Oklahoma. An English luxury sedan. I wanted to see what could be made out of signs that do not belong together. Or, as Charles Baxter puts it, “…the way structures of meaning, let loose from the objects they’re supposed to represent, are pasted onto something else…Words go wild.”
What else about your story might pique the reader’s interest?
Sex toys.
I got tagged in this chain letter blog fiction thing by the incomparable Laurie Ann Cedilnik, so here are some questions and some answers to those questions.
What is your working title of your book?
Unchecked Savagery - I guess it’s less the “working title” and more the “actual title” since it comes out in the next week or so. Buy it here!
Where did the idea come from for the book?
It’s a collection of flash fiction without any particular linking motif, other than an analysis of popular culture’s invasion and effect on American life and safety. Not like, “Oh man movies/video games are so terrible for us!” but the way that our learning is informed by those mass artistic outlets. When people are killed in a gun massacre, as is so often the case in this country, many people’s attitude is to imagine all of the movies they’ve seen in which gun battles are antiseptic and precise, and the hero always shoots the villain before any harm befalls the spectators, therefore there should be more people with guns. Popular art forms have taught us it’s easy to shoot somebody at a seconds’ notice, and we could all easily be heroes, but that’s just not true. I’m not saying this influence is wrong, but it’s something that interests me. Movies, tv shows, and video games have influenced people to become doctors, soldiers, and teachers as well.
What genre does your book fall under?
Flash fiction – I think the longest story in it is 700 words.
Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
Hm, there’s a lot of stories. Maybe Kristen Wiig could play Diane in “Soul Train.” She’s really funny. The story isn’t, but I always presume if a comedian can be funny on cue they can easily be sad on cue – sadness is a contemporary human’s default state.
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Unchecked Savagery is a collection of little stories about emotional neuroses amidst a glittering landscape of American malaise.
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
It is being published by Ricochet Editions, an imprint of Gold Line Press. Check them out!
How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
The earliest story was written in 2007, and while the most recent story was written in 2010, the revision process continued right up until the final proofs were sent to the printer in December.
What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
I definitely owe a lot of gratitude to Thomas Bernhard’s The Voice Imitator, and Lydia Davis’ Samuel Johnson is Indignant. But those are the books that got me started on flash fiction in general, and Bernhard’s been dead for years. A couple other books that I’d say it’s sort of similar to are One Hour of Television by Kristina Born, and The Map of the System of Human Knowledge by James Tadd Adcox (who I’ve tagged below!).
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
There are a series of seven stories spread out across the book that are white text on black background, with a little bit of the story that precedes the title. Each of those pieces is inspired by a particular genre of movie – romance, horror, western, teen sex comedy, sci-fi, war, and action. The resulting pieces often probably owe more of a tonal debt to those genres then a structural debt. I’ve seen a whole lot of movies in my life. Who hasn’t?
What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
The design is great – by Scott Massey, whose work you can find here. Here’s the cover!
Ok, next week will be Andrew Brininstool, who I’ll be posting about here, and James Tadd Adcox, whose blog you’ll find right here.
Hey, here’s an awesome poster somebody made for a reading I’m taking part in in Chicago in a couple weeks – come out if you dare!
Also click here to read a poem of mine in Mead Magazine.
Hey, if you live in Madison or a reasonable distance from Madison, come to the Monsters of Poetry tomorrow, October 12th, at the Argus Bar + Grill at 7:30 to hear me, Virginia Konchan, Ryan Collins, and Chris Mohar!
Also, check out the new ebook Anthology of Etiquette and Terrifying Angels with Many Heads from NAP edited by James Tadd Adcox and featuring work by me and lots of great other writers. It’s free!
EDITED BY JAMES TADD ADCOX
FEATURING:
MATT BELL, J. BRADLEY, CAROLINE CREW, MICHAEL CZYZNIEJEWSKI, JESS DUTSCHMANN, MEGAN M. GARR, MELISSA GOODRICH, A D JAMESON, MASON JOHNSON, M KITCHELL, ROBERT KLOSS, MEGHAN LAMB, SETH OELBAUM, BRIAN OLIU, JOEL PATTON, PONCHO PELIGROSO, CAROLINE PICARD, MATT ROWAN, JOSEPH SCAPELLATO, DAVIS SCHNEIDERMAN, GLENN SHAHEEN, DAN SHAPIRO, AMBER SPARKS, COLIN WINNETTE, & RUSS WOODS.
I’ve got an article up on LitBridge today as editor of NANO Fiction about how to publish your flash – check it out!
LitBridge has a ton of great resources for writers, so linger on the site for a while, too.
Also, I did an interview about being a Michigan writer with Deborah Diesen over here!
