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.
But why do the individual stories in a collection have to be connected in any way (tone, character, subject matter, etc)?
Friendlier, prettier, smarter. This illusion.
My beard grew wild, as did my waistline.
The way I write these aren’t like the way I told you I write these…
Imagined dignities.
AWP with 6$ plastic bottles of gnu pee.
Pour down a tall wine or two for ballast.
Drink. Love you, don’t like you.
Frogs. I like the attitude of frogs.
It was a night jump and I was drunk.
Prick-points of sensation. Get it?
Clinically, you know…
I will fucking stop for cornbread!
Like those balloons.
1. Fuck that story by that guy. Read something else. I wanted to introduce you to this new writer anyway and this story will make you pant-pee and laugh like a photogenic butcher.
2. Has anyone seen the fucking new Hayden’s Ferry? Number 46 is re-donk. I can’t link it’s so new. What’s up with these people? In a short time, they have made their magazine crisp, beautiful, full of bad-ass writing, crazy. I mean they stepped up their Slay and are not looking back. My mind on their magazine has gone from throw-me-a-bone to ranch-style nacho pie. Fuck yes. Get it.
3. fuck you. punk.
4. Yesterday walking the hallway and I see a lady at a table and advertising a free raffle. A FREE RAFFLE. What the fuck?
5. Heroin. Sex. Scientology. What do you want? NSFW pics, so sorry if you work on Saturday. I include this because I think the guy’s write-up was CW techniques all glow (He uses Tao Lin quotes and all types of solid pacing, transitions–“This is where things get weird.”) Also I’ve been drinking fake absinthe and it fit well in my “fuck” theme I have going here.
Last Thanksgiving I was staying at a friends house for a few days before a trip to South America.
Stories that begin this way always end up with heroin and Scientology, this we know. A lot could be learned from that opening sentence. If you say friends should be friend’s I’ll punch you in the spleen. It is Saturday. relax.
6. Kristen Shaw with a great fucking flash at decomP. It includes the term fuck.
I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect.
Stupidity is a talent for…
Drunk after one glass. They say I am susceptible.
State everything twice: once when sober, once when drunk.
I was drunk so was carried ashore. So what?
The fellow with the plum-pudding face. He sold me a cask of gin!!
(Written to Poe.): Sir. If you should come to Richmond again, and again should be an assistant in my office, it must be especially understood by us that all engagements on my part would be dissolved, the moment you get drunk.
Words are like carriage wheels. They move.
I am upset by little things.
Folks. Folks. I feel. I feel I have drunk something. This lecture cannot be given.
1. Sixteen drinks named for authors (with recipes)
2.Harry Smith sort of rambling a bit, sort of blowing a few joints. Cat’s cooler than buckets of toad.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdfCx13S5aI
3. Holy shit Sonora Review flash fiction contest will give you a sweet grand! That’s like 90 ecstasy tablets or 13 Poking Boxes. Joe Wenderoth will judge.
4. You edit an anthology. Do you include your own work?
5. Happy Easter!
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIl9rO9sURE
Clocked-in a reading recently by Mitchell L. H. Douglas. I was immediately glow, since he writes Persona Texts (I call them), specifically Donny Hathaway, his family and friends, his life.
Douglas is on a mission. He feels we have forgotten Donny Hathaway.
Many of the poems are the same poem, rewritten, reformed, re-done. Like jazz or mornings. Spun off into new territories, into improvs and pops and jams.
I was impressed. I told a student: “I want you to read his book and interview that poet.” A perk of teaching college is that you can assign such notions and the student pretty much will follow through. Grades are involved and so on. The student is named Aaron. This interview appears in the 2010 Broken Plate. And now online below:
How do you know you are a literary magazine?
I can’t say your name.
The Collagist makes me think about psychics and those cold case TV shows everyone apparently adores.
Pleiades sounds like a big important word, a cocktail party sort of term, joined with Richard Wagner or whatnot, a god or a sculpture in an ornamental garden, so I usually let someone else say it first, and then I just do a little intellectual chuckle and repeat whatever they say.
Dogzplot looks like it’s hard to say but really isn’t.
Damn, I thought this was going to be more dramatic, bit to re-shoot and all that is really not in the spirit of drunk sonnets. I’ll do another later. I am actually drunk. So sorry here. Some times with I could act more drunk when drunk, so sorry. But i sure as hell shot this poem and will shoot another better later. I do believe is shooting poems, as do you. i keep hearing birds.
S
Visit me! You can come unannounced, drunk, sober, or even leading a giraffe.
Rivers of gin and oysters.
Why did you tell that pretty girl, who was probably your sister, that I was drunk?
Muzzle a dog and he will bark out of the other end.
Instead of banning drink I will ban my limited sense of obligation.
The clouds once more bid me.
How drunk, or how drunkly sober under-drunk, can you calculate you are now?
Hurray for the wine-colored corduroy!
Sorry about last night. A sloth or mudlark would have probably been better.
No, I’m not drinking anymore. Only wine.
1. This Stephen King piece by William Walsh is exactly why I glow persona fiction. Not sure how I missed this. Maybe it was even noted here (I’m too lazy to look now). Anyway, enjoy. I think this piece is using the persona (King), its echoes, connotations, in a way I really admire and enjoy. Walsh is waltzing the term “Stephen King” in a technical manner. The King character is an object/emotion/thought process. It enacts a void and need and unspoken thing for this family. It…oh, I could go on, but why not read?
2. Sardine sandwiches do rock. (1:56 to end made me fly/why like a detail) I am serious now, go watch. Isn’t it what we like and need to live? Isn’t it a good story, or better a poem? If I could meet one sardine sandwich woman a day, this very life would be enough.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ872YZCPG8
3. Here are some crystals for sale at a reasonable price. They were found in Tao Lin, China.
4. I am sick, feverish, that somebody-stuffed-wet insulation-in-my-head-cavities thing, something, but just ignoring it because I have a lot of work to do. Does anyone like to write when ill? I have been writing the last two days and my fingers are large, like balloons (those party ones clowns make into dachshunds) floating over the keys, all tinnitus and forehead simmer. I’m not sure what it means to the words on the page. You?