Recently, I learned of yet another of my writing tics.  I get to a good idea, something that begs exploration or thoughtful reverie, but I stop short, and I write right past it.  I’ve always had this sense, wrong as I know it can be, that good writing is muddled, that a lot of the meaning is in the author’s head and the reader is supposed to piece it together.  I think this is true in a lot of ways, but I just think I took it too far.  I’d written bad poetry since I was ten or so, but I was proudest of the first poem I ever wrote for class.  It was high school, sophomore year, and we had a new teacher.  Her name was Tava, which I thought was very cool, and she had red hair and long fingernails that one student described as “small machetes,” which I mostly mention because I thought that phrase was funny and it has always stuck with me.  Tava, Miss Smathers, taught us both English and Spanish.  She was lively and energetic, and she danced around the room playing the maracas while we all sang the words to La Bamba, some of us automatically taking up the harmony.  In Tava’s English class we read East of Eden, that I remember, and we wrote poetry.  Our first assignment was to write a poem explaining the purpose of the moon.  So first I thought about what the purpose of the moon could be, and I decided it was to look up to, to sort of pray to; hope, I decided.  Read more »

This is the most powerful album I’ve heard in years, somehow feeling both brand new and really old–like weirdly ancient–at the same time, the whole thing getting way, way under my skin.  Also (and from Harvey’s site), “Award-winning photographer Seamus Murphy has produced a series of short films – containing footage shot around England and performance footage of Harvey – for each song on the album.” The complete video album is here. Unlike so much “video” that goes with music today, these short films are much more than marketing tools.  My only complaint about the films is that, while watching them, I can’t pretend that I’m in the 18th or 19th or early 20th century, which is where much of the music somehow seems to take me, though I don’t know what I really mean by that. Sometimes it’s like I’m in some kind of Shakespeare zone, with the witches from Macbeth, say; other times I get this Ford Madox Ford feel. A lot of the album seems to have the weight of modernist work, evocative of the years after World War I, all that loss and decay. It’s an incredible piece of work.

So good, I could be so completely entranced by the voice of his thirteen-year-old narrator, Jason, in his 2007 coming-of-age novel, “Black Swan Green,” that when Robert Frobisher and the Cloud Atlas Sextet (From his 2004 masterpiece, “Cloud Atlas”) make a cameo appearance, I was like Holy Crap! Did someone else know about this musical score? What is going on here? and then it registered: Oh yeah, same author.

So good, that his depiction of life as an unpopular, young teenager,  like a bizarro British version of my own, complete with a speech impediment and the chance to be part of the popular kids’ circle, before being relegated  to the lower echelons of the middle school pecking order, brought back long-buried, embarrassing memories.

So good, I’m in awe of his ability to tell a story in seemingly any fashion.  Unlike my other favorite authors with their distinctive styles and topics: Richard Russo-  multi-generational blue collar families in small east-coast towns, that have their best days behind them, or professor types who have escaped aforementioned towns; Haruki Murakami- deliberate, thoughtful male-narrators who encounter talking animals and crazy adventures,  usually while drinking whisky and making pasta; Margaret Atwood- small, spunky female-narrators who have been sexually abused by older, more powerful men and are still tormented, set either in Toronto or a post-apocalyptic, corporation-controlled world.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I devour books by those three like post break-up chocolate and pray they keep writing, but I always know what I’m going to get.  And I suspect that is a big part of what makes them successful money-wise.  Not that Mitchell isn’t successful, but his range of writing-styles makes buying a book more of a risk; you’re never quite sure what you’ll get.

Courtesy of Dark Horse Comics

It’s almost been a year since I’ve gotten my MFA, and aside from the precarious stacks of omni-genre books in my house, I’ve had one reading mainstay—Axe Cop. Every Tuesday, I open my computer at work and read a new page of a web-comic created by two brothers, Ethan and Malachai Nicolle. Malachai, a six-year-old, writes the book, while Ethan, his 30-year-old brother, draws it.
The story is also about two brothers—Axe Cop and Flute Cop—fighting bad guys on their flying tyrannosaurus that has Gatling guns for arms. Axe Cop carries an axe and tells bad guys, “I’ll chop your head off,” before decapitating zombies, robots and all manner of creatures (excluding girls, who he just knocks unconscious because they can’t be on his team).
It takes place in a world that William Burroughs and Philip K. Dick couldn’t dream up, where anything is possible: unicorn horns grant wishes; if you get an animal or vegetable’s blood on you, you turn into that animal (including an avocado); there is a hero with socks for arms who wields a golden chainsaw and gets Santa Claus’s powers, and a lobster/dog/zombie who can sense danger.
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i am not making this up.  i only wish i was.  oh dear lord do i wish i was.

let’s hope that barry bostwick’s next project, fdr: american badass!, is a step back in the right direction.  because i really did think his work on “spin city” and parent trap iii was excellent.  i don’t know how to make anything in this post sound sincere, so you’ll just have to believe me that it all is.

Thanks Wikipedia for the photo

On any given day I can be convinced to bemoan one of a million things about living in Spokane that drives me bonkers. Driving for example is both a game of chicken and a trial of patience (we all have different and dangerous opinions on what it means to yield). But I also appreciate living in Spokane, more than I often admit and when one day I leave this sprawling, woody metropolis, I already know three big reasons I am thankful I came to school here:

1. Surviving Winter – I cannot stress enough the amount of mental toughness it takes to endure a winter in the Pacific Northwest. People who were born here or have lived here for years take for granted that there are places where it doesn’t snow in April. There was a moment in November, right around Thanksgiving, when a bad spell of weather hit and I can’t even remember the amount of Spokanites who loved telling me that “This was just the beginning.” And while most of my fellow classmates left Spokane for Winter break, I was here pulling my hair out and gnashing my teeth as blanket after blanket of snow covered my neighborhood, Brownes Addition. And yet, there were moments in the pre dawn hours as I cleaned off my car to go to work, sweating in my five or six layers, as the rest of Brownes was quiet of screaming meth heads, that I had the most treasured moments I’ve had thus far. Us poets tend to be a bit maudlin and often suffer from mental strain and yet I think surviving a Spokane winter is like Marine bootcamp for writers.  Even if I can’t do actual push-ups, I can do mental push-ups. Read more »

Every Wednesday in Spokane, local writer Mark Anderson hosts an all-ages open mic, known as Broken Mic (curiously titled, since the microphone works just fine, but no matter). 96% of what is read aloud is poetry, and in fact, host Mark Anderson calls the event Poetry Broken Mic when he goes through the introductory song-and-dance before welcoming the first reader to the stage. I write essays and not poems, though – ergo, I read essays at Broken Mic (typically essays that my thesis adviser has dismissed as too underdeveloped and sophomoric for my thesis). I read at Broken Mic every week because I like to practice reading aloud in front of an audience I like to have my writing applauded. (Oh, relax – writing is rarely a gratifying experience at the desk, and it’s nice to have some positive reinforcement, even if the audience is just being polite.) A few weeks ago, during the intermission of the two and-a-half hour long event, young and hot and up-and-coming local slam poet, Tim Johnson, came up to me and said something like, “Sam, your shit’s hilarious, but it’s never about anything whatsoever.”  I responded by saying, “Huh-huh – yeah dude, that’s how I roll,” or something boneheaded like that, but he did have a point – I hardly ever, at live readings, read anything that comes around in the end, or “accesses the heart of the human condition,” or whatever pithy clause I’m sick of hearing. The truth is, I rarely know what I’m writing about in essays, anyway, until like the third or fourth draft, and once I make that discovery, it’s usually depressing and full of sentences that work on the page but sound ho-hum when spoken aloud, and who wants to go to readings to be bored and depressed? What I’m trying to get around to is this: essays or short stories at readings need to be kept short and light, and don’t necessarily need to take the audience members somewhere new and unexpected in the same way print writing does.

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See photographer Jill Krementz’s collection of writers and their dogs over at the New York Social Diary.

See more writers and kitties at Writers and Kitties.

In fiction workshop, we talk a lot about avoiding the pitfall of too much exposition in stories – or, in layman’s terms, the pitfall of too much telling, not enough showing. The reason for this isn’t a particularly abstract one. Generally speaking, readers prefer to have things shown to them rather than told. Because telling is boring. That’s why TV is so popular and no one listens to the radio anymore. Well, that’s a gross overgeneralization, but you get what I mean.

This is all kind of a round about way for me to talk about Cats. You know, like the musical, Cats. Cats was in town last weekend and a friend and I went to the show for the purposes of both irony and cultural literacy.

I’m not usually a fan of musicals. A couple years ago in Seattle I saw the play The Little Dog Laughed, which is about a theater actor who falls in love with a New York callboy. (Did you know that “callboy” is a compound word? I just learned it.) When they are first getting together, the callboy worries that he doesn’t have much in common with the actor because he knows nothing about the theater. He adds something to the effect of “I can’t stand musicals. I get embarrassed whenever anyone anywhere starts to sing.” I heard that and thought, yes, that is indeed the problem with musicals. There’s something slightly embarrassing about the whole arrangement.

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This does not even remotely compare; photo courtesy of CC licence, by DerekL on flickr (click through)

Went to an estate sale on Saturday for a guy who’d owned a used book store for many years, then closed up shop and took all his stock home. Basement was literally waist deep with books, the main floor and upstairs only knee deep. Had to climb on piles of books to get to other books.

Like nothing I’ve ever seen, and so terribly sad to hear the sound of pages rending from their spines when stepped on.

And so terribly sad to hear the estate salespeople say that it was the last day of the sale, 50 cents a box, on Monday they were all going to the dump because nobody wanted them. They’d tried the local libraries, high schools, prisons.

And so joyful to see so many people enraptured by all those old books, climbing to find treasure. And so terribly sad to know that all of us combined would barely make a dent, and in a day or two they would be food for a landfill, to decompose in its endless plastic belly and covered by old mattresses, broken vacuum cleaners, rotten leftover chicken.

Among us one old man on his hands and knees in the corner, picking trampled books off the floor and arranging them into neat stacks twenty books high, doing so when I got there and still doing so when I left.

In two hours I read a thousand titles, fought the urge to find a shovel, stopped and nearly cried once, nearly shouted with glee once, nearly elbowed a young woman to get at a hardcover set of Updike, nearly found the December 1923 National Geographic for a middle-aged man with a box full of faded yellow covers and one book on building patio furniture.

I saved seven boxes that day, and that night I mourned for the rest.