Got the new FENCE & Redivider…

…and FENCE is looking pretty sweet. The cover, for one thing, is fantastic:

And I’m really intrigued by some of the content, specifically Carley Moore’s prose poem “My Friends and Enemies.” Essentially, it just lists all the friends and enemies from the narrator’s childhood (taking seven pages to do so), but you get a pretty great look at how that child grew up. This is mostly interesting to me because this guy brought in a list of all the girlfriends he’d had to a fiction workshop I had last year. While he failed, Moore did not.

And Catherine Wagner’s poem “This Is a Fucking Poem” really grabs my attention (aside from the obvious reasons). I’ve read it through three or four times and the language is absolutely arresting but I’m having trouble figuring out what it’s about. I shall keep trying.

Then I went and got a copy of the new Redivider. And their cover isn’t bad…but they’ve certainly had better. The little green guys kind of scare me. But the interior art is phenomenal AND there’s a Blake Butler story I can’t wait to dive into.

Today is a good, good day.

Drift Update

Things like this never happen to me.

Last week I received an e-mail from a higher-up in the WLP department at Emerson, saying they received some sort of ‘refund’ for me in the mail, that I should come pick it up. So I do. I’m shocked to find $7 cash and a brief note (“Refund for DRIFT”) signed by Victoria Patterson. It took me a few minutes to realize this, of course, must be in response to my recent post about my disappointment with the collection.

I don’t know how to respond, but I know I cannot accept a ‘refund’ for any type of literature, no matter how much I disliked it. That’d be like returning a candy bar because you didn’t like how it tasted. It isn’t done. But there wasn’t a return address, so I have no place to send it.

Victoria, if you’re reading (and, somehow, it seems, you are), I’m flattered you take the opinion of this nobody seriously enough to send him a refund. I’m going to hold on to it and put it towards your next book.

First PANK of the Year

The first 2010 issue of PANK is live! Some great names (and some new names) as always. Check out Maureen Alsop, Andrew Borgstrom, Mark Cunningham, Geordie deBoer, Sutherland Douglass, Dave Housley, Stephanie Johnson, Carolyn Kegel, Thomas Patrick Levy, Amy McDaniel, Carrie Murphy, Joseph Murphy, Alec Niedenthal, Ani Smith, Janey Smith, and myself.

Drifted Away

I really wanted to like Victoria Patterson’s collection Drift. Really, I did. It has great reviews on Amazon and kind of does what I want to do for my BFA project: linking short stories to form something like a novel. The main theme, dysfunction on Newport Beach, is nothing new, but something I’ve liked in the past. So it should have had potential.

But three stories in, I had to stop reading. I couldn’t do it anymore. Already two stories with divorce and two stories with sexual-identity-crisis. It’s fine to follow themes, but this was too much. And I didn’t buy her voice as a man’s for a second.

I found the writing on a sentence-by-sentence level confusing, wordy, and pretty full-of-itself. It’s like she thinks she’s better than she is. On the back of the book, some author says something* like “Victoria Patterson has incredible talent.” It’s too bad she didn’t use it. I mean, only three of the stories had been published previously…that should have clued me in before purchase – I guess there’s a reason it’s only seven bucks.

I feel ripped off.

*I don’t have the book with me so I don’t know who said it and I don’t know if that’s the actual quote.

I Wonder

Ever get so bored you can’t read?

That’s where I’m at right now.

BFA Planning: Linked Stories

I have (almost) exactly a year until my final semester at Emerson, when I’ll be putting together a creative thesis to earn my BFA. This means, mostly because I plan everything far far FAR in advance, that it is time to make some decisions. My initial inclination was to write a collection of short stories incorporating space without trudging into murky sci-fi waters.

But that was short lived. Since then I’ve become enamored with the concept of linked stories: short stories that can stand alone, but also work together to tell a larger story, akin to a novel. This will probably be significantly harder to do, because I’ll have to focus in on a single subject instead of jumping around (as I’m inclined to do), but I think it will be worth the challenge.

I have all-but-officially-decided to write a series of linked stories about Dillon, a character from my story “Where He Would Be,” a hit in my last workshop that’s currently making submission rounds at a few literary journals. He’s a pretty awkward fourth grader and I’d really like to watch what happens as, and when, he grows up.

The challenge will be, of course, to make sure the stories work alone. I don’t want to write a novel. I want to be able to send these stories out, then work them in together. For inspiration, I’ve made a list of eighteen such collections to read between now and then:

• Elizabeth Strout – Olive Kitteridge
• Paul Auster – Invisible
• James Frey – Bright Shiny Morning
• Daniyal Mueenuddin – In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
• Gloria Naylor – The Women of Brewster Place
• Paul Yoon – Once the Shore
• Victoria Patterson – Drift
• Rebecca Barry – Later, at the Bar
• Tim O’Brien – The Things They Carried
• Bret Easton Ellis – The Informers
• Donald Ray Pollock – Knockemstiff
• Kate Walbert – Our Kind
• Monica Ali – Alentejo Blue
• Alice Fulton – The Nightingales of Troy
• Joan Silber – Ideas of Heaven
• Sara Pritchard – Lately
• Tim Winton – The Turning
• Sandra Cisneros – The House on Mango Street

Does anyone have any suggestions of books to add to the list? I want to make sure I read a few whose stories are far far different from one another, but still (at least kind of) flow.

This Is Perhaps the Start of a Male Enhancement Found Poem

I can’t get over how funny some of the spam messages I get are, particularly the ones emphasizing the importance of male enhancement (natural or otherwise). I’ve been writing down the subject lines before deleting them…the most recent ones include “durable woody in pants,” “the concentrated machodizer,” and “be young down there.”

Is it weird how I find them slightly charming? And would anyone enjoy a found poem collecting them all?