When I tell people I’m a poet, the reactions range from That’s nice to Why? to dumbfounded silence. My favorite reaction though is when, upon hearing the word poet escape my lips, someone immediately feels the urge to recite whatever Shakespeare soliloquy or Robert Frost poem they were required to memorize in high school. I seriously love when that happens. Like when I told one of my 70-year-old bowling friends back home that I got into a poetry program, he congratulated me by dramatically reciting, “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Who knows how long that poem had been a part of his consciousness, a tiny snowy bundle in his brain. And he still knew it. Every word.

This past week I had the pleasure of helping out with and attending my second Poetry Out Loud Regional Finals. (For those of you who don’t know, Poetry Out Loud is a national poetry memorization and recitation competition for high school students. There is scholarship money available at the state and national levels of the competition. Scholarship money! For poetry recitation! Winners also receive money for their school to purchase more poetry books, which is equally as cool.) Read more »

Since I stopped seeing girls as “soft boys who smelled nice,” (in quotations because I read that somewhere many years ago and it neatly sums up gender relations from the POV of a elementary school boy), until early adulthood, I nursed two fantasies about where I would meet my soul-mate.  The first involved wandering the aisles of a used book store (okay, Barnes and Noble).  The second was serendipitous seating on an airplane.  I never really outgrew this phase, and while working for Willow Springs I added a third category: the slush pile.  You might logically ask, how is that even possible?

In my head, I would find a great story by a fellow aspiring writer, and while the story wouldn’t be accepted for publication, I’d be tasked with sending her a personal rejection from my email account asking her to submit stories directly to me in addition to the online submission manager.  She would, and perhaps she would ask to see some of my stories, and then the timeline of this fantasy gets a little murky.  I suppose we’d somehow eventually meet up and live happily ever after.

I never pursued anything like that because, unlike the bookstore or airplane, it would have been super creepy.

It’s been many months since I’ve read Willow Springs slush, so I relegated this bizarre fantasy to the nether regions of the brain.  Then, a few months ago, I really hit it off with a woman on a date.  Like me, she had recently finished an MFA and was struggling to make it as a writer.  The date went so well that we started emailing and g-chatting later that night and I learned her full name.  And it was really familiar.  Tip of the tongue familiar.  But I couldn’t place it. I wondered and wondered, but the only possibility, longshot and all, was, you guessed it, “Willow Springs slush pile.”  Memory is not exactly my strong suit.  But when I asked, she went and checked her submission records, and sure enough, she had submitted to Willow Springs a couple years ago when I worked there.  The short synopsis of her story struck me as very familiar, and when she sent me the manuscript, my suspicions were confirmed.

I don’t like to brag, but this was pretty amazing.  Out of at least hundreds, if not thousands of manuscripts, her name had lingered.  To be fair, her story had been discussed at a meeting, so I’d read the piece at least twice, but still, this seemed like a sign.  Was it meant to be?

Unlikely.  As she flaked out on our next date, and flaked on our rain-date (get it?) and then didn’t respond to a third date request.  Such is life.  Time to buy some new books or do a little more traveling.

Hello and welcome. Have a nice day.

I have a fantasy—we all have a fantasy—that someday someone will write a dissertation on our body of work—that one day someone will read something we wrote, looking for meaning rather than flaws. In my case, the paper would be titled: “Over Easy: Diners and Dives in Michael Bell’s Early Stories” and would trace the absolute saturation of my little canon with diners as settings and eggs as images.

I didn’t realize that diners were my fallback until graduate school, when three of my first four workshop pieces took place in diners. Instead of rejoicing at how easy it would be to title a collection of such stories (House of Pancakes, Dave’s, Lumberjack Special, etc.) I began to panic. I thumbed back through my earlier stories, found a big diner scene in my undergraduate thesis and, to my horror, the second story I ever wrote was titled “Sunnyside Up.”

So I banished diners for a while. Read more »

Just so you don't get any illusions about where I'm going with this. (Photo Credit: IVAW.org)

“How’s it that the only ones responsible for making this mess, got their sorry asses stapled to a god damned desk?” – Tom Waits,  “Hell Broke Luce”

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I read an article on Huffington Post the other day, written by a former SEAL, one Chris Kyle, United States Navy (Retired). It recounts his first kill as a sniper out on the Teams, back during the early days of the Iraq war. The premise is one we’ve all read before: young marksman, part of a campaign to win hearts and minds, makes the call to take down an enemy combatant when faced with a threat to the lives of his fellow soldiers. In this case, the target is a woman, berobed, who approaches a squad of Marines then produces a Chinese grenade from the folds of her abaya.

The narration was functional enough. Spare. Utilitarian. I found the recounted dialogue, chewed-up and dumbed-down for a clearly civilian audience, to be stilted and unconvincing. There were clearly ghostwriters involved. The author might have been a crack shot, sure, but he’s certainly no Timothy O’Brien or Anthony Swofford. And that’s okay. A warrior doesn’t need to be particularly well-spoken to do his job; we just lionize the ones who are.

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Hey – it’s been awhile. My MFA-related job as a line cook has taken over my life, my dreams (literal and figurative), and my time to read and write as much as I want and need to. I did just read (before I received a text, asking if I wanted to come in to work early to help subdue today’s behemoth prep list) a great essay, Darwin and the Art of the Three Star Review over at Vouched. I personally tend to read more music reviews than book reviews – often times more than I actually listen to the music, but anybody with a fetish for reading book reviews, often times more often than the book under review, ought to check this essay out. Perhaps I’m a little biased, as it’s written by my friend Kyle Winkler and published on my other friend Christopher Newgent’s website, but it’s a great look at the phenomenon of judgement over a lifestyle that goes unrewarded more often than not. That’s all. I miss you guys. Time to go make gumbo, mainline corn pasta salad into the Appalachian veins of morbidly-obese yuppies, and slice off an opposable thumb.

You start to look a lot like Egon, when you're crazy.

Near the end of last school year, when I had run into a creative wall—long before the assignments stopped being due—I was doing everything I could to avoid writing. Mostly listening to hyper-emotional music. The sad stuff while lying on my back, under a sheet. The pop punk while jumping from my bed to my desk chair…because the floor was lava.

It all made sense at the time—unlike my final workshop story, which chronicled, among other things, an argument with my garden gnome, Armando, as to whether or not I was the reincarnation of Egon Schiele.

Sounds great, I know.

The piece may sound like it had no redeeming value, but there was this one anecdote from my actual childhood that stuck out through all the weirdness. It was about a time during high school when I tried to comfort Thomas, a victim of bullying, who was contemplating suicide, and how I ultimately failed to respond effectively. Read more »

Although the boxing gym looks nothing like this, there's still a bit more fighting involved than I prefer.

On Monday, I went with three other EWU MFAers to a boxing gym. I know this sounds like the start of a joke – four writers walk into a boxing ring and – but it’s not. My friends joined the gym at the start of the quarter and have been working out there three times a week. At a party last weekend, they were singing the praises of the experience and I, a few drinks deep, said something along the lines of “Take me with you! I wanna punch some bitches!” So on Monday, they took me with them.

I got an introductory lesson on how to stand, how to protect my face, and how to throw a punch. This was pretty rad. I’m sure to anyone watching, I looked like a giant Gumby doll wearing boxing gloves – floppy, too-long limbs folded at awkward angles. But just being in a real boxing ring with my fists up made me feel kind of tough and cool. Plus, my tiny, feisty girl instructor shouted “get your shit together” every time I lost my balance, which is a surprisingly effective instruction. I wish some one would come by my desk once an hour and say it to me while I write. Anyway, it was a great workout. Afterward, the gym’s owner pulled me aside and asked me how I liked it and if I wanted to join the gym. I told him I did like it, but I would have to think about it.

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No one likes to be misunderstood.

At least I’m assuming, and shamelessly projecting upon others the alienation that I myself do not savor…

The fact is — as I write whatever I write — I do not really know what I’m intending to mean, and therefore appreciate another soul making the effort to comprehend that proposition or observation or truth claim around which my words take tentative and perhaps over-confident stabs in the dark.

This, I’m afraid, is the best any reader or any literary critic can offer by way of definitive credentials.   “Ours is in the trying,” muses T.S. Eliot (italics mine).  We put our stuff out there and hope for a dialogue partner, and at our best, do not react with a hyper-critical defense which degenerates into the slinging of mud or jello…  Or even the defense which ostensibly folds its arms and snickers in condescension.

Daisy Fried, in her New York Times articles and in her Poetry Foundation commentaries, has exercised her readership’s cerebral capacities for over a decade now.  I love that about the poetic graduate of Swarthmore College — that she pushes and prods and gets our synapse connections firing on all cylinders.   And I want her to know that I used to ride my bike through that upscale campus and pick up, as through osmosis, the academy’s deepest thoughts.   I did this, however, not for the sole purpose of one day asserting that  William Carlos Williams is the Dante of the American twentieth century (a comment that makes me want to dig further into the Inferno and perhaps learn the epic in the original Italian).  But I thought those thoughts, which were clearly above my blue-collar rank, because it seemed to me then, and seems to me now, that no one owns this dialectic terrain… that intellectual property is nothing more than a cold, stony seat in the amphitheater where scholars and non-scholars may cool their heels, listen and perhaps chime into the conversation.

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We made it through November and December unscathed by the snow. But now we’ve reached January and the snow came with a vengeance last week. Since I’m from the Midwest, snow does not scare me. In fact, I enjoy it. It’s pretty and it makes the cold that much more bearable. The snow reminds you that it’s winter, and it’s not just cold out of spite. Now, I’m not saying that I love snow, I’m not a winter sportswoman or anything like that, but it’s okay. Anyway, my point is that in the Midwest, we prepare for the snow. It’s not a matter of if it snows but when. Spokane has not had this realization yet. Snowplowing in Spokane is something saved for the apocalypse. It’s a friggin’ mess out there.

So in honor of the winter colors outside, the melting slush and muck, here are some songs about winter. Read more »

Did you know that coffee is actually a fruit and not a bean? What a wonderful world.

I was raised Mormon, so there was never any coffee around my house growing up. I always enjoyed the smell whenever we ran across it in Einstein’s Bagels or at the airport, but the drink according to our faith was strictly prohibited, as were alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes. While I have abandoned my Mormon faith, I still observe most of the dietary restrictions—a nod to my culture, I guess—all except for coffee, which I now drink every morning.

It was a chain of events that led to my first cup: For reasons that I will never understand, upon entering college the first class I signed up for was Macroeconomics 256 at 8 a.m., a class that would earn me the lowest grade of my scholastic career (C+). This was due, in no small part, to the timing of the class in conjunction with my habit of spending the small hours of the morning playing Chutes and Ladders at various 24-hour diners. My first cup of coffee was actually a cappuccino that I picked up a drive-thru place, Café Expresso (stet), on my way to that class. On Fridays, I would reward myself with a café mocha.

When I drank my first cup of regular joe, however, it was a year later when I was taking Intro to Creative Writing. At night, I would walk down to the 7-11 and buy a cup for a buck-seventeen, and I’d sneak it down to my basement room where I would sit at my desk and write little stories and poems or exercises for the weekly class. At the time, I loved the process of sitting down and pounding out a story. I would sit there for four or five hours—the coffee, long since cold—till the draft was done. Read more »