"Cagarse en Le Leche" at Necessary Fiction

I have a new story, Cagarse en la Leche, up at Necessary Fiction. You can also read my reflections about its germinal here.

Big news tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Live Action

The Emprise Review, who were kind enough to interview me back in the spring about my recent projects, were also kind enough to put up video of the May 18th City Sages: Baltimore reading at Barnes&Noble Johns Hopkins. The video features readers Michael Kimball, Jessica Anya Blau, Madeleine Mysko, and me.

Monday and everything after

Went to an always-stellar lineup at Last Sunday, Last Rites Baltimore. Was especially impressed by the poetry of e. megg magee. If you're in town on Sunday nights, check out this series at the Baltimore Hostel.

If you missed last night and need your fix before the holiday weekend, check out the new nonfiction reading series, New Mercury. Their next reading is May 30th, 7 pm, with readings from Charles Cohen, Melissa Hale, and Steve Luxenberg.

Also, the summer issue of jmww will be up this week, so stay tuned for that. John Madera has chosen some fantastic pieces for his debut as senior flash editor.

An oldie but goodie (first published in flashquake):

Sharp Objects

We take the dog on one of her long walks, following the perimeter of the harbor down to Henderson's Wharf, then back. I am quiet; you intermittently discuss the future. Would you like to look into buying one of the waterfront townhomes? No, I decline. Too expensive. We need to get a sailboat. You can always sail on your father's, I answer noncommitally.

I have a sharp object hidden in my hands. At some point, I must be ready to plunge it into your heart.

Not tonight. It can never be taken back once it is done, the stab. There is no room for error.

Recently, I have seen your weapon as well, the glint from your waistband. It reassures me, knowing you are prepared. Perhaps you will make a preemptive strike.

But are you prepared? You complain your hand hurts; it dangles, flaccid by your waist, next to your knees, which also ache.

Why are you not a bear charging instead of this fragile deer?

I lie awake, feeling the edge on my fingers. I toss and turn and feel its teeth in my stomach, my arms, my neck. I must sleep with it, night after night, so that you don't find it.

You will always know its purpose.

A Lovely List of Ladies (and one Gentleman)

You can read another lovely story from Kathy Fish, "Skinny Lullaby at the Lizard Lounge: Schenectedy" at Necessary Fiction today. Be gone with you, over there now.

I'm also reading The Complete Stories of John Cheever. I like that they're in chronological order, so that I will be able to track the evolution of his art. Unlike Joyce Carol Oates' High Lonesome, which kind of goes every which way.

I forgot to mention the tribute to Lucille Clifton tonight at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Central Branch. I hope you can make it!

A Tribute to Lucille Clifton

Join us for this celebration of the life of Lucille Clifton. Poets from Baltimore and around the state will raise their voices to honor the memory of Clifton's life and works. We invite you to bring your favorite Lucille Clifton poem to share.

Thursday, Jun 24, 2010 (6:30 p.m.)
Enoch Pratt Free Library
Wheeler Auditorium (3rd Floor)
400 Cathedral Street, Baltimore MD

Misc. Reading Photos

With Shya Scanlon, KGB Bar, NYC, 6/4



City Sages Baltimore reading at Cyclops, 6/19

Dog, God, or something

Dogs bark way too much in modern novels, according to an article in Slate. And birds always chirp, but cats never meow (at least, in my own unscientific survey). But what does it all mean? Are we too uncreative in our grounding of scenes, do we overrepresent the canine metaphorically? Do we care? How come no one ever writes about canaries anymore?

I, myself, wish I could keep the swimming pool out of my work.

I'm working on this novella of flash/wiki entries about a girl, Alex. I don't know what I'm going to do with it, if anything (and I really should be working on my actual novel), but it's been fun to play with. I try to write a flash piece every day for it, although some get sucked into longer things and others get scrapped. Here's today's piece, "Mix Tape":

Mix Tape

Your brother would be Evan Dando if he were a rock star, Alyssa said once after he’d visited Alex at SMC for the weekend.

What about me?

You’d just be Alex.

Alex wants to be someone cool and ethereal, detached, like Lush or My Bloody Valentine or the Cocteau Twins, but, embarrassingly, her heart is the Indigo Girls. If she could be Ricki Lee Jones or Joni Mitchell, not care what other people thought, she would settle for such. But her clothes are too store-bought. She can’t stand the smell of the co-op. She still cries no matter how many times she’s seen ET, when the flower is dead, even though she knows ET will live. She still believes everything she is told.

How did you turn out so well-adjusted? Her mother asks her years later, after her father moves in with Steve, Nathan disappears in LA.

Indigo Girls, she says. Her mother pretends not to hear her, or maybe she really doesn’t. Her eyes are looking out the window, far beyond the trees.

Reading events w/o 6/20-6/25

Some more cool reading events next week:

June 22, CityLit Press Launch Party and Fundraiser, 6-9 pm, Langerman's

Join the staff and board of CityLit Project to celebrate the launch of CityLit Press. Special readings by literary artists involved with the press's first two books: City Sages: Baltimore and Mountain, Log, Salt, and Stone. Geoff Becker, Jen Michalski, and Rosalia Scalia will read.

6-9 pm, Langermann’s, 2400 Boston Street, Baltimore, MD 21224
$40/person includes hors d’oeuvres, beer, wine, and nonalcoholic beverage. For information: 410-274-5691 or info@citylitproject.org

June 24, Genius Party at the Hexagon, 7 pm

Featuring a new video by Stephanie Barber and readings by Rachel B. Glaser, Natalie Lyalin and Mike Young and a YouTUBE open mic and more

June 24, 7pm at the Hexagon, 1825 N Charles St, Baltimore, FREE

Turkey Bomb

I like the sound of these two words together. I don't do prompts, but I think I'm going to write a story about a turkey bomb. I imagine a couple of boys stuffing a turkey with fireworks to blow it up over Thanksgiving holiday. The turkey may or may not blow up, but a bunch of other symbolic explosions will happen.

New Potomac Journal Online

The new Potomac Journal is up today here.


Poetry by Roger Netzer, Sonja de Vries, Dan Cuddy, and more; fiction by Nathan Leslie, Ryn Gargulinski, Ellis Hunter Loth, and others; and reviews of collections by Cara Candito, Alice Ostriker, John Burstein, and more. You can also read Margaret Diehl's review of Six-Legged Creatures, Norm Ball on American politics and power, and Gregg Mosson on the presidential inaugural poets. Give them a click!

Reading Events in Baltimore, w/o June 13th-June 19th

It's a busy week in Baltimore, and I wanted to let you know about a few writing-related events:

Thursday, June 17th: jmww publisher Jen Michalski and contributor Nathan Leslie will be reading at the Maryland Writers Association-Howard County Chapter ice cream social in support of jmww's new print anthology, jmww IV (Best of our 2009 online issues). If you're interested in attendingout or becoming a member of the Howard County Maryland Writers Association, send me an e-mail!


Friday, June 18th: City Sages Baltimore Reading at Cyclops Books, 8 pm. Sages contributors Betsy Boyd, Maud Casey, Caryn Coyle, and Rosalia Scalia y will read and sign copies of City Sages: Baltimore. Cyclops is located at 30 West North Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21201


Saturday, June 19th: City Sages Baltimore Book Signing at Ivy Bookstore, 1-3 pm. Sages authors will sign copies of the anthology. The Ivy is located at 6080 Falls Road, Baltimore, MD 21209-2230


Saturday, June 19th: 510 Readings: Laura Ellen Scott, Timothy Gage, Bill Black, and Curtis Smith, 5 pm, Minas Gallery, Hampden. (Minas is located at 815 W. 36th Street, Hampden)



ABOUT THE READERS:

Nathan Leslie is the author of six books of short fiction, one book of poetry and editor of two anthologies. He is the fiction editor for Pedestal Magazine and was the series editor for Best of the Web. He lives in Northern Virginia, and teaches at Northern Virginia Community College.

Jen Michalski's first collection, Close Encounters, is available from So New (2007) and her second is forthcoming from Dzanc (2013). She is the editor of City Sages: Baltimore (CityLit Press 2010) and editor of the literary e-zine jmww (http://jmww.150m.com/).

Betsy Boyd’s short story “Scarecrow” received a Pushcart Prize in 2009. She has published stories most recently in Shenandoah, Upleasant Event Schedule, and Verb: An Audioquarterly. Betsy was born and raised in San Antonio and now lives in Baltimore. She has received an Elliot Coleman Fellowship in fiction and a James A. Michener Fellowship in screenwriting—last summer she attended Klots Artist Residency in Rochefort-en-Terre in Brittany. She writes freelance copy and teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Maud Casey is the author of two novels, The Shape of Things to Come, a New York Times Notable Book, and Genealogy, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and a collection of stories, Drastic. She has received international fellowships from the Fundacion Valparaiso and the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers, and is the recipient of the Calvino Prize and a 2008-2009 DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Artist Fellowship. She lives in Washington, DC, and is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, where she teaches in the MFA program.

To pay the bills, Caryn Coyle writes press releases, speeches and newsletters. Three years ago, she started writing fiction, and her ninth story was recently accepted for publication in Gargoyle. Her stories have been published in jmww, Loch Raven Review, The Santa Fe Writer's Project Literary Journal, Preface, and a few others. She won the 2009 Maryland Writers Association Short Fiction Contest. A graduate of the College of Notre Dame of Maryland and the Johns Hopkins University, she reviews dives and greasy spoons for the website Welcome to Baltimore, Hon.

Rosalia Scalia’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in North Atlantic Review, Pebble Lake Review, Taproot Literary Review: The Healing Tree #20, Pig Iron Press, Quercus Review, The Portland Review, Spout, the Canadian literary magazine, South Asian Ensemble, the Canadian literary Web site, www.sikhchic.com, among others. “Sister Rafaele Heals the Sick” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and “Picking Cicoria” won first prize in the Taproot annual literary fiction competition. The first chapter of her novel-in-progress, Delia's Concerto, was a finalist in a 2003 National League of American Pen Women competition. Scalia earned a master’s in writing from Johns Hopkins.


Laura Ellen Scott teaches fiction writing to undergraduates at George Mason University, and in 2009-2010 published 19 short stories in print and online, including work selected for The Wigleaf Top Fifty and Barrelhouse magazine's Futures issue. Her work was nominated for Dzanc's Best of the Web 2010 anthology twice, and she is currently Fiction editor of Prick of the Spindle.

Timothy Gager is the author of eight books of short fiction and poetry. His latest, Treating a Sick Animal: Flash and Micro Fictions (Cervena Barva Press), features over 40 stories, many previously published in various literary magazines. He hosts the Dire Literary Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts, every month and is the co-founder of Somerville News Writers Festival. He has had over 200 works of fiction and poetry published since 2007, of which eight have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Timothy is the current Fiction Editor of The Wilderness House Literary Review, the founding co-editor of The Heat City Literary Review, and has edited the book OUT OF THE BLUE WRITERS UNITE: A BOOK OF POETRY AND PROSE FROM THE OUT OF THE BLUE ART GALLERY.

Bill Black's work has appeared in The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Hotel Amerika, The Black Warrior Review, Short FICTION, and elsewhere. He has taught literature and creative writing at Western Washington University, Ohio University, and The Johns Hopkins University, and is currently Writer-in-Residence at Misericordia University in Dallas, Pennsylvania. He a founding Co-Director of the Pages & Places Book Festival in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Curtis Smith's stories and essays have appeared in over 60 literary journals and have been cited by The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, and The Best American Spiritual Writing. Press 53 has released his last two story collections (THE SPECIES CROWN and BAD MONKEY); Casperian Books has published his last two novels (SOUND AND NOISE and TRUTH OR SOMETHING LIKE IT). This fall, Sunnyoutside will publish his essay collection, THE AGNOSTIC'S PRAYER.

Novella Month, Emerging Writers Network

It's Novella month over at Dan Wickett's Emerging Writers Network, and Dan offered me a chance to chime in on what I think a novella is. To read more, go here. And then, check back every day, 'cause other Dzanc authors are gonna weigh in (JA Tyler already has).

KGB Bar reading and NYC

Friday night at the KGB bar in the East Village is like Saturday night at the Apollo (at least for me, anyway). So many people show up to hear a good reading on the strength of the bar's literary reputation, and I hope we didn't disappoint. I was plenty nervous! There were some great readings from GD Peters, Shya Scanlon, Peter Schwartz, Robert Lopez, Ken Sparling, and others. Many kudos to Paula Bomer for setting everything up. And thanks to Michael Pollack, Dawn Raffel, and Heather Fowler who showed up in support—it's nice to see familiar faces in a strange city.



Were we bummed that the New York Public Library was closed because of its summer hours? You betcha.

Alone Again, Unnaturally

I really like Roxane Gay's discussion about her story "Do You Have a Place for Me?" in today's ORIGINS column at jmwwblog. Not only is the deep feeling/romantic tension very true in many platonic female relationships, but I liked the fact that Roxane began to write the story in the bathroom stall of a small-town bar she was patronizing with friends. As a writer (and also as an introvert), I too have trouble staying in the moment with people, places, preferring to steal away by myself and analyze what is happening or write about what is happening. It works for being a writer, but I often wonder whether I'm missing out as being a human being.

Although no one seems to live in the moment anymore. Anyone is concerned with preserving the moment/controlling the narrative of their lives, aka Facebook and twitter and text messages. God, we are the most self-absorbed fakers ever.

Published for a Day and Other Musings

Word Riot is having "Published for a Day" on June 7th. Jackie Corley et al "will post an entry with links to downloadable PDFs of novels and book-length short story collections (at least 25k words) that will be available for one day and one day only: 12 a.m. to 11:59 p.m. on Monday, June 7." The only requirement is that you have published in 1 of 21 journals (jmww included). So dust off your Great American Novel or short story collection and send it off! An agent might be lurking.

The June 2010 issue of decomP is hot off the press.

What else? Don't forget the FICTION Magazine, Dogzplot, and Sententia reading at the KGB Bar in New York this Friday, June 4th, at 7 pm. I'm excited to read and to finally meet Kim Chinquee and Heather Fowler, Shya Scanlon, Peter Schwartz, and others.

Memorial Day

Dreamed of the old dog last night, not the new one, just as one dreams of old lovers, old friends, old schools. There is no present, or maybe multiple presents, where everyone meets and stares at one's hands awkwardly, spinning in my palm. Or everyone dies—everyone dies and one wakes up and ponders the greater significance, the meaning, and there's no way of knowing. It's like believing in God or not, taking the road east or west because you think you'll reach the sea, one has to, God forbid the gut-sinking cliff drop or mountain in the way.

We went the Cylburn Aboreum and smelled the trees and flowers but didn't see any birds. We saw a magnolia with leaves the size of our faces. But so hot. When we got to the snowball stand on Fleet, its first day of the season, a group of fireman, their truck in front, had beat us to it, and they laughed. "Beat you to it," they smiled, and we wished we had our camera, because those kinds of memories deserve more than spotty synaptical weavings. Later we saw them at the gas station, filling up, before our delicious sleep. Delicious sleep! Our hike was over by noon and we spent Memorial day in delicious sleep, behind blinds. And then I wrote, and wrote and dreamed about writing so that my head feels quite tired.

I had a lot fun doing this interview with Dawn Raffel. FURTHER ADVENTURES IN THE RESTLESS UNIVERSE is quite an amazing collection of stories. It's the kind of book I want to keep in my purse and read whenever I've down time somewhere—the voice of the stories, the cadence, is comforting and engrossing. I remember trying to write a story like Dawn Raffel, but how can you? There's the rhythm of the words, the pages, but it's like trying to draw a tree and not just the representative of one. The history, intricacy, the pulse of Dawn Raffel that lives in her words is not my pulse. I should pay attention to my own wet beats, my bird breaths, feather rustles. I should learn that the quite space in us is not really quiet.

I compromised and had turkey hot dogs. Mmmm.