While we’re on the recommendation circuit, let me recommend Elizabeth Ellen’s brilliant essay “Stalking Dave Eggers” in the latest issue of Bookslut. It’s funny, sad, thoughtful, full of amazing parenthetical asides, wide-ranging in a clever way and honest in the best of ways. Click if you want to read about how we live in the age of clicking.

Elizabeth Ellen is the author of Before You She Was A Pitbull (Future Tense Books 2006), and has work featured in two chapbook collectives: A Peculiar Feeling Of Restlessness (Rose Metal Press 2008) and Fox Force 5 (forthcoming from Paper Hero Press). She is a Deputy Editor at Hobart and edits Short Flight/Long Drive, Hobart’s books division. Stories/poems of hers can be found in print issues of Hobart, Sleepingfish, Keyhole, Opium, and online in Waccamaw, Dogzplot, ActionYes, Juked, and 3AM.

I wish I had met Elizabeth at AWP. I think I spoke to her once, but I never found the courage to introduce myself. I don’t really have a rational explanation for my being timid, and I realize how silly of me it was to worry about that sort of thing. I think, though, it had to do with my feeling awe, maybe, in her presence. Elizabeth Ellen’s was one of the first names I remember seeing everywhere when I began to discover that writers had made their way onto the internet.

So it makes me really happy to post Elizabeth Ellen’s word space/essay for you.

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there is a new issue of DOGZPLOT up. ELIZABETH ELLEN, BRAD GREEN, JA TYLER (he is now JA, not J.A., as in “jah” as in “jah calling”), VERLESS DORAN, HANNAH PASS, BRIAN ALLEN CARR, NATE TYREE and other people (i just lost the will to continue to copy and paste the names).

I’ve written about her before, but frankly, I could write about her every week. Check out her website for all thing Elizabeth Ellen, including contributions to A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness (Rose Metal Press and a forthcoming chapbook with Paper Hero Press. Here are some power quotes from the woman who was largely responsible for my change in opinion of “online writing”:

From an interview in 3am magazine (linked here):

As for getting noticed…I don’t know. You can always try to be controversial, I guess. That’s certainly one way of getting noticed. Initiate a public feud. Be a dick. Write about it on your blog. That sort of thing. Other than that, I’d say just keep doing what you’re doing. This is going to sound like total, lameass bullshit, but I swear it’s true: I enjoy writing. I love it. I get off on it. I don’t do it to be in a particular magazine or to get a particular publisher’s notice. Not that I wouldn’t be stoked to be in The Paris Review or Tin House or with a major publisher. Of course I would. That’d be awesome. It’s just not something I think about on a daily or weekly basis.

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Being sort of old school and timid of new things, I didn’t realize that the internet indie lit scene rocked until I read Elizabeth Ellen. Fucking A.   I didn’t even know who Barry Graham was until I read everything that Elizabeth Ellen has ever published and everyone knows how important Barry is to me.  The clarity of  emotion! The  rawness! Her boobs! I worship her. She makes me a better writer just by having read her stories. And poems. Read her story on Dogzplot right now and tell me that it isn’t one of the bravest, twisted things of beauty that you’ve read. I also like that she’s got a tween, like me and Barry.  I like everything about her and I don’t know her at all!  You can read about her life story though at Michael Kimball’s “write your life story on a postcard” thingy. But really, buy her chapbook, Before You She Was a Pittbull. Then, hang out all day on her author website, clicking away at all of the links. I think she needs to update her website, though, and I would offer to help her with that because I love her so much.