Another one gone
February 26, 2009
Denver joins the list of cities with only one newspaper.
The Rocky Mountain News publishes its last issue tomorrow.
It makes me damn thankful to live in a city where media outlets have to compete—it puts a fire under everybody to get out and dig. The Sun-Times broke the hired truck scandal and The Reader broke the systematic police torture. You get the kind of context you can’t expect to find on TV or radio soundbytes.
Just sad, that’s all. Nobody here wins, least of all the amazing reporters now out of work. It’s not a good time for anybody to be jobless, but with the Tribune Co. in bankruptcy and my old Gannett friends taking involuntary furloughs, it’s especially bad for the Fourth Estate.
Chicago Reader changing hands?
February 20, 2009
Frankly, if this deal goes through, it may be good news for the venerable Alt-Weekly. Its parent company is already in bankruptcy and it’s laid off a bunch of DAMN good reporters. Having the paper in the hands of somebody who — gasp! — wants to run papers can’t be any worse than being owned by ticked-off creditors.
How Come No One Celebrates My Alcoholism Like John Cheever’s?
February 18, 2009
AWP wrapped on Saturday, yet more than one person I know still aches from the long nights of alcohol and idiocy. Then, while cruising the archives of The Onion, I spot this gem.
How Come No One Celebrates My Alcoholism Like John Cheever’s?
You know, seminal American author John Cheever and I have a lot in common. He needed to drink a fifth of scotch before he had the courage to utter a word to another human being, and so do I. Much like Cheever, I’m completely blotto by 10 a.m. because of a deep, withering fear that my family will eventually discover my bisexuality. And, to top it all off, we were both born in Wollaston, Massachusetts, if you can believe it! But just because he’s one of history’s finest short story writers, Cheever’s epic benders are considered delightful, whereas I’ve just got a “serious problem with alcohol.”
What a bunch of horseshit.
You wouldn’t believe some of the outlandish and totally inappropriate things my drunkenness has caused me to do. Dark, crazy stuff. But guess what? I didn’t write Falconer, so I’m a disgrace to everyone who loves me. It’s discriminatory.
Pure genius.
Kick-ass off-site AWP event
February 11, 2009
Just a few blocks south of the Chicago Hilton.
AWP: Literary Death Match
February 11, 2009
WEDNESDAY WEDNESDAY WEDNESDAY!
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
6 to 8 p.m. at The Hideout, 1354 W Wabansia Ave.; $5
In concert with the AWP Conference, LDM Chicago, Ep. 1 (the 24th LDM ever) will bring together six readers from six of today’s finest literary journals and concerns (reading for five minutes or less), in what will be a literary celebration for the midwestern ages.
The event will feature Rachel Yoder (Quick Fiction), Holly Wilson (Southeast Review), Julius Kalamarz (Juked), Gwendolyn Knapp (Hayden’s Ferry Review), Megan Stielstra (Dollar Store Reading Series), and Aaron Burch (Hobart); all critiqued by an all-star panel of judges including Kevin Guilfoile (author of Cast of Shadows), Matt Herlihy (founder of Sweet Fancy Moses), and Mark Bazer (“The Interview Show”).
Kwame Dawes is kicking my ass
February 9, 2009
I just picked up his first novel, She’s Gone, to read before AWP kicks off this week, and damn, son. Let me tell you, Chapter 2 is a master class on story movement and interpersonal space.
I’m a bit embarrassed to say that this is the first book in a long while I haven’t been able to put down. I haven’t been finishing many books lately. It’s refreshing to be hooked again.
Why Yates? And why now?
February 8, 2009
Bookslut.com has a wonderfully insightful feature on the incomparable Richard Yates that asks, “Why Yates? And why now?” It’s got some great background on the flawed genius behind Revolutionary Road (the film version of which is a fantastic adaptation that you really ought to see).
In 1999, the Boston Review published Stewart O’Nan’s long appreciation of Richard Yates, whose fiction had fallen out of print after his death in 1992. How, he asked, can Yates, who “represents an important aspect of the American experience: the confusion of the post-war boom,” be so neglected? A “fine writer” and gifted mortician, Yates anatomizes the desiccated corpse of “American individualism,” the hollowed-out hopes of a country and its citizens.
So began Yates’s second coming: Revolutionary Road was reissued the next year, and his other novels soon followed. In 2001, Picador released his collected stories. His fiction appeared in The New Yorker for the first time.
Read the rest over at Bookslut.com.
Knockemstiff
February 7, 2009
Knockemstiff
by Donald Ray Pollock. Doubleday, $22.95. In paperback March 10.
**** out of *****
Sometimes it’s hard to feel sorry for people who end up living awful existences when they repeatedly make awful choices. But there’s no hemming and hawing among the characters in Knockemstiff, Donald Ray Pollock’s debut collection of stories.
A fictional representation of Pollock’s real-life hometown (named for a nasty fight outside the church), the easy out would be to call it a gritty, redneck Winesburg, Ohio.
But there is no easy out in a town like Knockemstiff.
Most everybody has designs to leave, but they all end up back in the holler. Over and over, Pollock puts their backs up against the wall. It’s eighteen stories span thirty years of the town, who’s characters are seldom, if ever, upstanding people. In “Real Life,” a father pummels a man in a drive-in restroom so viciously his teeth punch through his cheek, then makes his 7-year-old son beat the hell out of his victim’s boy. In “Blessed,” the narrator falls off a roof during a burglary and can’t feel his legs, and his partner kicks him onto the hospital parking lot, where his painkiller addiction starts. In “Lard,” teenagers give the fattest kid in Knockemstiff bong hits in exchange for letting them throw darts at his stomach.
The characters may not be upstanding, but they certainly are people, and Pollock puts us in their shoes; reading story after story involving drug use and violence and abject poverty leaves you with a visceral feeling of being trapped. That’s no small feat. You may not like the characters in the book, and you may not want to spend time with them, but among the depravity, they become real. Pollock writes with prose so authentic, so tight and engaging that you root for them even when they’re despicable, and that’s what keeps the pages turning.
Musical influences include…
February 6, 2009
So you know how annoying it can be to have a song stuck running through your head? (I’m looking at you, Free Credit Report.com guy.) Somehow, lately, I’ve managed to have between two and four running through there at one time. As in, as soon as one song hits a pause in the melody, another one works its way in. And they’re all from my trusty writing or editing standby albums.
On the writing side, a couple tracks from the amazing new Ra Ra Riot album, The Rhumb Line. It’s a fantastic listen the whole way through. Dynamic and energetic, full of lush string arrangements, it makes great background music. And besides, Shiv over at WOXY.com—one of the bastions of independent radio—has it on his Top 20 of 2008 list.
For editing, I gravitate toward harder-edged music, which helps alleviate any frustrations that may occur. Lately, that’s been the 2001 album Mclusky Do Dallas. If you can imagine a bastard child of the Pixies and Weezer who grew up in Wales and recorded an album in the middle of a week-long crystal meth binge, you’ve got the gist of it.
Fictionary put to bed
February 4, 2009
Finally.
Guido Mendez's cover
After a couple months of staring at this magazine until my eyes ached, it’s done. Our designer, Guido Mendez, did an amazing job, and we’ll have this out in time for the AWP Conference next week—knock on wood; I don’t want to jinx us.
But I have to say, I’m really proud of this. We’ve managed to create solid magazine journalism while including all our departmental news in a way that doesn’t come across as chest-thumping. Jon Fullmer’s feature on Joe Meno is a fascinating glimpse into the work ethic that leads to Joe’s seemingly superhuman creative output. Ilana Shabanov’s “Postcards from the Program” takes a look at how travel to—and living in—a foreign country influences writing and the teaching thereof. And (speaking of chest-thumping) you can read my profile of Booklist associate editor and Story Week mainstay Donna Seaman on my Stories page.
