Vilont People Episode 2: Foozy Doozy

The Vilont People - Foozy Doozy

 

Quarters Could Not Save Him

quarters.

 

Cheap Cheap Cheap

Haagrahaaeeeooo.

 

Ben Raker’s 50 Word Hero’s Journey at A Boy, A Cat, A LifeBoat

Yann Martel + Joseph Campbell = a tower of flames

While at Seattle Book Fest, Ben Raker was in an audience challenged to submit a tiger and life boat story to help with the ongoing effort to make this an open-source narrative form: the “Hansel and Gretel” of our age. That same day, for business school, he received the assignment to write a 50-word (exactly) saga using Joseph Campbell’s famous hero’s journey which features, departure, trials, return.

 

Read his story at A Boy, a Cat, a Lifeboat. Write your own story and send it along.

 

Vilont [sic] People Episode 1: Scarroween

The Vilont (sic) People - Scarroween

 

Stack of my book Shoot the Buffalo in Progress at the Publication Studio

Matt Briggs SHOOT THE BUFFALO, Jank Edition, coming to life. Available in our store starting October 31, Halloween!

 

Fan Fiction in Opium9

Can I ride with you?

I have a story in the current issue of Opium Magazine in a section edited by Shy Scanlon. He was looking for “lit fan fiction” My story appears along with Ryan Boudinot, Ben Greenman, B.K. Evenson, Sean Carman, Nick Bredie, E. Loic Leuschner, Blake Butler, Matthew Simmons, and Lindsay Mound. I wrote a fan fiction of Jim Crace, Being Dead, about two decomposing bodies on an English beach. It’s a love story. My first ever published love story, I think. You can read about the mag and purchase a copy online or at fine booksellers who carry Opium.

 

Reading tonight from Birkensnake II in South Lake Union

Birkensnake abroad.

I’m reading tonight with contributors to Birkensnake II. The reading is in Seattle at the Inner Chapters Bookstore in South Lake Union at 7:30 free of charge to the reading public, and presumably free to everyone else. The magazine is curiously to me heavy on the speculative side of speculative fiction. I’m kind of new to this genre and don’t’ really understand what it is, although it is clumped in with Science Fiction and Fantasy. But then writers as different as David Ohle (Motorman) or Alasdair Gray can be clumped into this genre.

I’m reading with Tina Connolly, Evelyn Hampton, and Caren Gussoff:

Tina Connolly wrote this as the first two sentences in Birkensnake I, the first issue: “This is the first stereoscope in the park. Seventy-two percent of unattended humans stop to view pictures in this stereoscope first.” You can read her entire story here.

text blocks printed via copy machine and finagling, time honored traditions of printers everywhere

Evelyn Hampton wrote this sentence among a collection she recently published, Not That Far: “It is good for the theater when you do not know you are in the theater. Same goes for the city. It is good for the city when you believe you are in a theater having a dream.” This seems sensible to me, and good advice. You can purchase your own copy of her book and read all of more of her sentences here.

Caren Gussoff wrote crazy, odd lit fiction in the time before Kelly Link was writing crazy, odd lit fiction. Maybe Kelly Link was already writing this stuff then, but I didn’t know it. But in Seattle in the mid-1990s there was sometimes Rebecca Brown, always Stacey Levine, and Caren Gussoff writing these types of stories. They said one thing and meant another thing and I could never figure, and I still can’t, figure out how these things were written. Caren Gussoff is reading tonight. She has a story a story about garbage collectors in the future when they are not allowed to the touch the trash. You can read her story here.

 

Would I Lie? a reading and talk with Tim Elhajj at Seattle Book Fest

I’m going to be reading with Tim Elhajj on Sunday at 5 PM at Seattle Book Fest. Tim has recently begun publishing a series of very short nonfiction essays (at places such as Brevity and the New York Times) about his experiences as a homeless man, addict, and growing up in Pennsylvania with the name Elhajj. The short-short or flash fiction or whatever you want to call it seems to be the genre of choice online. I have mixed feelings about the vast majority of these pieces since they often either way cute, a bit pat, or revel in the well wrought sentence and are so intently focused on making language new they feel overworked and manic. When this comes to nonfiction it can be really painful, even if the thing I’m reading is only 500 words. Tim manages to be at once natural and usually presents a kind of complete thing in a very short space. I don’t feel manipulated or tricked or forced to admire his language. Instead often read his work and feel engaged. I hope you can come by Book Fest and listen to Tim read his stories and see what we have to say about telling very short nonfiction stories.

Here is the description of out reading/talk (after the break):

 

a boy a cat by Justin Dobbs at A Boy, A Cat, a LifeBoat

Submit to the A Boy, A Cat, A Lifeboat

Justin Dobbs has just published a new story, “a boy a cat,” on the blog, A Boy, A Cat, A Lifeboat. The blog is a series of short stories based on the public domain idea of a boy, a wild cat, and a boy stuck in a lifeboat. This ancient idea already been used in several novels including the modestly successful Max and the Cats by Moacyr Scliar.

A young, winning boy, he liked to curl up in front of the mayor’s fireplace with the black tiger who had wandered into the house after a tea party. — Justin Dobbs