Sean Lovelace is running right now, far. Other times he teaches at Ball State University. HOW SOME PEOPLE LIKE THEIR EGGS is his flash fiction collection by Rose Metal Press. His works have appeared in Crazyhorse, Diagram, Sonora Review, Willow Springs, and so on.
and the new JMWW is out.
and Jane Priddy writes about Lorrie Moore writing about the Huck Finn censorship dust-up.
and Wyndham Lewis goes all:
Gertrude Stein’s prose-song is a cold black suet-pudding. We can represent it as a cold suet-roll of fabulously reptilian length.
Behind every cloud is another cloud.
I think there’s something peculiar about me that I haven’t died.
I was born at the age of twelve.
When I walk onstage you should hear my balls clank.
I believe in the idea of the rainbow. And I’ve spent my entire life trying to get over it.
If I am a legend, then why am I so lonely?
I am a chemist. I know what pills I am taking!
The most nightmarish feeling in the world is suddenly to feel like throwing up in front of four thousand people.
At least one wall is shaking.
There is fat and there is bloat.
I’ve either been an enormous success or just a down-and-out failure.
I’m not drunk. I am glazed.
I want to finish this, do you mind?
Enormous snowflakes stirred, shifting the Wednesday reek. A lumpy yellow package arrived at my door. Inside were a flask and a one short story, “Diner” by Mary Miller. I dabbed at the folded pages. An enormous fox squirrel appeared at the window and whined. I filled the flask and finished the story and opened the oven door and dumped in tortillas from the pantry and sat back down again and hit the flask and emailed Mary Miller with some questions:
(Exciting spoiler! This interview debuts an awful Mary Miller poem.)
1. Diners fascinate. They seem archetypal to me. I think of Hopper’s Nighthawks or Hemingway’s “The Killers” and naturally Hollywood’s many diners. It is your title and setting. Could you knock around this idea of the diner?
Over at CNN they are publishing the poetry of the Arizona shooter. Here is the first poem, titled “Meat Head.”
11. For all you punk-asses that need writing prompts, there is a weird little flash contest coming up over at Flash Fiction Chronicles.
5. Oh, flash fiction is:
“…a place for writers to talk ABOUT fiction, and its feats in that weird mysterious way that fiction talks beyond the story on the page.”
Deb Olin Unferth
Take that, you flash-bastards. You’re the same people that don’t like olives, microchips, inward blushes, hall mirrors, and other small things.
1. Rock and Roll is finally dead.
99.
7. Back when a professor visited my MFA university and taught one class, a class about HER. She made us buy and read all of HER books. WTF? I thought divas were for music and acting. Memo to writers: No one gives a damn. Well…Nother time a reader visited and insisted we bring her ribs. She was all, “I’m in Alabama, you WILL feed me ribs.” A graduate student had to drive his turd-colored Ford Escort all night. There’s no rib place open way late in sleep-ass little Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Ends up they gave her Chili’s ribs, not ribs at all, unless you enjoy pale under-belly of cardboard. Diva behavior from writers? From writers! Do tell:
This semester I teach a service learning creative writing class. I am excited and anxious (first time I’ve taught the class). “Service learning” palms a galaxy of definitions. Here is mine, as I’ve been thunking on it:
1. You must have a focus. I do. Empathy at its core, and I might write more expansively here later about this complex idea (and the word empathy itself), but my concept includes a literature list, books, excerpt readings, the power of writing, to show, to act as an actual social tool. Like a hammer. Seriously: Like a hammer.
2. You must engage with the community. Feet on ground, ass in seat. We will. The students will meet a minimum of 7 times—in one semester–with their community partners. We will create a print anthology and give a public reading, in a space OFF university grounds.
3. You must reflect. Why even do this? It’s not enough to say, “it’s a good thing”, “giving back” “whatever cliché.” Blar. I think the class, for the students, is pretty meaningless without serious reflection on the process, or why community work is even important, or why we might want to even talk/walk with someone not ourselves. So what? Always a great question. I want the students to answer me when I kindly and firmly ask, “So what?”
Anyone taken one of these classes? Taught one? Any advice? I’m not jesting—I haven’t done this. Any exhortation, forewarning, steer, 2.4 cents worth? What is service learning to you? Our model is, as writers with CW writerly skills (many prerequisites to take this class), to “tell” the stories of marginalized populations. The writers and partners meet to tell the community partner’s story (one or many), in a poem, story, or essay. Is that the best way? What do you think?
I earn more than I thought I would when I became a poet
And no reason to talk about the books I read but I still do
Don’t leave it all unsaid
Well, I wouldn’t object to being approached, put it that way
They said they respect me, which means, their judgment is crazy
If you really concentrate on the Top 40 there aren’t really that many striking individuals so it is rather easy within that block to be anarchic
Artists aren’t really people. And I’m actually 40 per cent papier mache
I find agreeable people immensely disagreeable
I was always attracted to people with the same problems as me. It doesn’t help when most of them are dead
Am I looking in the mirror?
Any fool can think of words that rhyme
There are some bad people on the rise
Sell all of your clothes
We hate it when our friends become successful
The traditional viewpoint is to scowl, but I don’t understand that
Rejection is one thing – but rejection from a fool is cruel
There’s more to life than books you know, but not much more
3. Mud Luscious Press goes all web update, all Heidi Blair Montag with a touch of Birdman. It detaches the retina in a kind way. Go look.
3. A get-off-my-plot-of-lawn-quote:
55. Harmony Neal uses repetition at January 2011 Hobart. You know, repetition, like this, via BHR:
3. The Girard Perregaux 925 Silver / Celluloid “Tourbillon” Fountain Pen goes for $1785.
14. Off The Internets for 8 days and what does that do? Doesn’t make you write, I say. I didn’t, sans two checks and an entry in a running journal. But it do refill the synaptic bathtub, me thinks, possibly with bubbles. Things brighten, shard, slow. I would like to write today, I’m saying. So. I ponder what happens when you leave The Internets?
11.
well I sincerely cannot think of a way that the holidays, as we know them, have anything to do with art. except for the ways we are tested.
Lucy Corin
78. Soth takes photos worth eye-meat.
14. Christmas Eve flash (scroll down–it involves a ham) by Pamela Painter.
22. Hey, pick me up that Thomas Pynchon first edition for $51,000.
00. What are the best books that fit in a stocking? I’m going Big World, but you?