I’m still here, I promise. As a matter of fact, I’m more here (here being the internet) than ever before. Check out my new story up in the new issue of Burner Magazine which is another scene from the story you might have listened to at The Drum last summer.

Or, if you’re more of a print literature kind of guy, head on over to the Logan Square Literary Review to buy issue five, containing a short story of mine called ‘Rapture’.

And more great things to come. I promise.

I’m a midwesterner now, splitting my time between New Buffalo, MI and Chicago, IL. So far, so good, though, and seriously I know everyone gets it, but that lake is huge.

Anyway, as I seek to break into the Midwest book and publishing scene, I’ve met Dave Stockdale, a young writer in the city. He’s started a new blog featuring young, experimental writers in Chicago, and I’m his first featured author. Check out his blog here, and let me know what you think.

That’s all for now– more soon, I promise.

The job is not without it’s pleasures. I chose the aisles I want to organize. I’m fond of the PSs and the PQs, naturally. The PNs, while often entertaining, don’t hold my attention as well. TR is lovely for a break, but I wouldn’t want to shelf-read there all summer. Though anything is better than the thin-spined musical scores and songbooks of the ML420s, that just might be my least favorite.

It seems, too, every summer since I’ve started work at the library that Rimbaud jumps off the shelves and into my arms when I cross his path high up and sweaty on the third floor. Today, it’s Enid Starkie’s biography, “Arthur Rimbaud”, that has landed itself on my desk. There’s something summery about old Rimbaud. The heat, the sweat—I don’t know just what.

Last summer I passed my time with Un Saison En Enfer, moving slowly and heavily from the verso’s French to the recto’s English. It was hot then, and I lived in a dim second floor apartment on a leafy but busy road. My room jutted out from the rear of the house and so I had windows on three sides, with green leaves pushing in against the screens. It was a perfect was to read Rimbaud, I think, and a more perfect place to romanticize the tragedy of his writing life.

His best (his only) work behind him at the age of 22! It was shocking, then, when I was 22, to think of what life would be if I ceased to write at that moment. I’d only just begun, it felt like. I still feel that way, another year out.

As I continue to write, I continue to read Rimbaud, and perhaps learn a little bit of the alchemy Ms Starkie is telling me he was after.

P.S.

My story, Testimony, is up today at The Drum. Check it out!

I was making dinner about an hour ago, slicing into a beet. God damn, beets are beautiful. Their skin is dark and dirty, heavily lined and really rather unattractive. The bottom end tapers off into that horrible little tail and the top sprouts wildly in all directions.

And then I sliced in.

The concentric rings of dark and lights, the bright red, the brighter pink and back to the bright red. Sliced in half it looks as much like a heart as any child’s simple drawing. Whole, as much as any anatomy text book.

And as I was slicing more, cubing, lifting and removing the pieces into the pot of boiling water beside me, I though, you should write about this. Write about how fucking beautiful beets are. Talk about how red they are, how bright and various. Hell, talk about golden beets if you want.

And then, well, then, I remembered Tom Fucking Robbins and his lovely novel Jitterbug Perfume. Why bother writing about a vegetable that already has such great press coverage?

For a while a few years ago, my housemates and I would google one of our dinner ingredients and ‘poem’, and then read the resulting poem before the meal, almost in place of a prayer. Literature always has been a sort of religion for us, I suppose.

The resulting poems were often silly, sometimes serious, and very occasionally quite lovely. Here’s a link to one of my favorites, about potatoes.

Maybe I’ll dedicate myself to food poetry, excusing (and surpassing?) Tom Robbins, as I do?

I passed a few hours in Boston yesterday, recording my story, Testimony, for The Drum. It went fairly well, I think, and I only stumbled across a few sentences. Not so bad for twenty pages of monologue, if I do say so myself. The editor who did the recording seemed great, and from her enthusiasm for the project, I expect The Drum to last a long time and prosper the whole way.

THis afternoon, I was writing a bio to appear next to my picture on their website, and I had a moderately hard time figuring out what to write. Currently, all the bios on the drum read pretty much live C.V.s for the writers, and sadly I don’t have much publishing behind me. I settled on some simple sentences about myself, and called it a day.

In other news: I just put up a story on the New Fiction page. You should go read it, here.

I do believe that’s all for now.

I liked it. It’s Aimee Bender, and so even if it’s not great, it’s very good.

I remember my first Aimee Bender. It was The Rememberer from The Girl in the Flammable Skirt. I was in an advanced writing workshop at Hampshire College, and the professor passed out photocopies of the short-short. We read it aloud, and I remember thinking: Yes. This. It was so good, and so short. It opened up my eyes to the possibilities of flash fiction, and—truly—the possibilities of language.

I devoured her collection after that. I went through all the stories, and yes, I loved some more than others, but I loved them all. Each one was tinged with the unreality of reality. Each one was beautifully articulated.

I was excited but skeptical when her novel, An Invisible Sign of My Own, was due for publication. Could she do it? Could she keep up the fantasy she has mastered in short-form, extending it over the course of a novel? I was nervous that her magic couldn’t sustain itself through 200 pages, but in the end it did. An Invisible sign of my own was studded with her characteristic oddness, but set more firmly in a reality most people can relate to. It was there that Aimee Bender alleviated my fear. That I became sure that everything she writes will be beautiful, sad and successful (three things I, too, aspire to).

And so it’s no surprise that I preordered her latest effort, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. It’s no surprise, either, that I cleared a chunk of time on Tuesday to read the whole thing.  And I liked it. Truly, I did. But I can’t help thinking that if this were her first novel, my fears about sustaining the suspension of disbelief over such great distance would have been realized. Rose Edelstein can taste feelings—and she does, for 304 pages. That, I could buy. Hell, I loved it. Bender so clearly makes plain the suffering inherent in empathy. We feel Rose feeling her mother’s sadness and later adulterous happiness. We delight when Rose delights in the cooking at the French bistro. It’s lovely.

I lose pace with the novel when Rose’s elder brother begins to disappear into chairs and mattresses and whatever else. It’s perhaps here that Bender begins to ask too much of her readers.  It happens quickly and quite by surprise, so that the reader is left very much in the confused dark.

Luckily, this is about 200 pages in, and Bender has given her characters and plot more than enough momentum to launch them that last tricky hundred pages. And surely things to clear themselves up as those pages pass by, but I finished feeling a little disappointed.

It’s short, and not so sweet, but worth a look.

I spent the winter in a bit of a seasonal depression daze, submitting to journals and reading sad books and eating a lot of soysage. Yeah, that’s right, not even real sausage. Soysage. But, it’s paid off some–two works to be published in July!

Collective Fallout will be publishing a poem of mine, Stiff, in their next issue. And I know what you’re probably saying to yourself: “Collective fallout? Isn’t that that queer sci-fi journal?” Well, obviously yes it is. And before you jump to any conclusions, no, I don’t write queer sci-fi, but they liked a poem of mine anyhow, and want to print it. I’ve accepted, naturally.

The Drum is a really cool Boston-based lit magazine that specializes in literature for your ear. An audio recording of each short story or essay is available for download on their website. They’ve selected a short story of mine called “Testimony” to appear in their next issue, also due out in July. I’ll be heading down to Boston sometime this month to do a recording of the story at Grub Street.

Champagne for everyone!

It’s structured into six separate stories, intermingling and building off of each other across the five hundred pages. Each section is written in a wildly different style; from journal entries to letters, sci-fi modern to crime thriller, Mitchell seems to have set out to wow the reader with his abilities as a stylist.

A comet-shaped birthmark on their collarbones links the characters that populate the novel. The reader is perhaps meant to believe that each of these main characters (save one) is a reincarnation of the same soul. Mitchell presents this idea to varying degrees in each of the stories, none more overt than in “An Orison of Sonmi~451”, the fifth section of the novel. Sonmi~451 is a soulless clone created for service in the food industry. Because she is soulless, the characters (and readers, too) are forced into discussion of souls, reincarnation and what it means to be human.

It was then, with Sonmi, that it became clear to me that these six stories overlap and intersect, but that I certainly shouldn’t expect them to rely on one another or coalesce at the final turn of the page. Rather, they exist in the same universe and strive to show the reader that people in all arenas of life are faced with similar problems. The characters demonstrate and complicate our understanding of love, friendship and religion in their daily interactions; even the characters that are unsympathetic or unscrupulous are human and so deserving of a kindness.

Having finished this now, I’m tempted to begin going through the whole Mitchell catalog. I can’t decide if I should start at the beginning or wait for his newest novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, out this June.

For the last week, I’ve been reading Eula Biss’s Notes From No Man’s Land: American Essays. The essays are critical looks at race in America, and they come at you from some surprising directions. Also, the book has won several awards for nonfiction this year, most recently the National Book Critics Award. Biss traces the cultural history of the telephone pole, she takes us on a driving tour of Chicago’s South Side. She brings us into a pre/post 9/11 classroom in New York City. Biss’s interrogation of racism is deeply personal and the essays are at the same time journalistic and critical as they are heartfelt and confessional. The deeply subjective narrative is peppered with references and quotes in a way that makes me wonder what it would look like if I had to cite sources in my diary.

Biss’s writing is smooth and clean. Her sentences are polished and the words she chooses seem to indicate a tremendously careful and painstaking writing process. In that sense, the prose is not unlike her 2002 debut The Balloonists, a lovely little collection that defies classification as prose-poetry/short-fiction/autobiography/memoir.

I first read The Balloonists as a student at Hampsire College, an alma mater that Biss and I share. We also shared an advisor at Hampshire and it was she–Lynne Hanley–who first gave me a copy of the book. I was blown away with the simple beauty of The Balloonists. It’s been a while since I’ve read it now, but I can clearly recall some of the strongest images and the style of the thing. I want to call it an invasive sense of invited intrusion into a life. I’m not convinced that makes much sense, but it’s what I’ll say for now.

I greatly look forward to whatever else Biss might offer us, the reader, in the coming years. It’s so rare for me that I find a writer of nonfiction who appeals to me as much as writers of fiction do; I’m so rarely interested in facts and realities. Eula Biss calls out for attention and admiration in the quiet way of the very best writers.

Flatmancrooked has been doing some interesting things since their inception in 2007. Their LAUNCH program is inspiring and innovative.You should go read about it, and then participate.

It’s their newest program that I am interested in today. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of the physical book. As the Kindle and the Nook and iPhone and now the iPad become ever more popular in the field of literature, people have begun talking about the death of print. Indeed, the internet is aflame with people already mourning the loss of print. I am with the thinkers who believe that print will never really die–that as long as there are readers there will be physical books. The book, to me, is as necessary as the words printed therein; the text can exist elsewhere (the internet, ebooks, fax bombs) but the reading experience is intrinsically different with different mediums. The future of the physical book is uncertain, but Flatmancrooked’s ZEB ensures that the book does indeed have a future.

The Zero Emission Book is attempting to redefine how books are promoted and, more literally, made. James Kaelin is the author of We’re Getting On, the novella at the center of this remarkable project. We’re Getting On is printed on 100% post-consumer content, and the cover is made from a paper containing spruce seeds. If you’re wondering if you can plant that book, well, the answer is yes. And that’s just what Kaelin will be doing as travels across the country next summer promoting We’re Getting On. A copy of his book will be planted in each city he visits, and if seeds work the way I’ve been led to believe, in the future a spruce will grow there.

To promote his book, Kaelin will be biking cross-country giving readings and signing copies of his book along the way. Keep your eyes on the website for details as they arise. The tour will wind its way (slowly, I imagine) from Los Angeles to Boston next summer. Invite Kaelin to read at your book store or library along the way. After all, it’s only polite since he’s invited all of us to ride with him as he makes his way East.

Aptly titled, as I think I owe an apology for not updating in some time.