I’m happy to say that my short story, The Ant Singer, is now up at the journal Bourbon Penn, as well as on Kindle, and in Print.

The editor, Erik Secker, contacted me as he was a fan of Couch. How fun – Thanks Erik!

Not only that, I’ve begun the next poem, and within a few days time you may challenge me to orate the first and the second, one after the other, if your tolerance for that sort of thing is high enough. By the end of the month, who knows how long I may be able to hold you captive.

I used to read a lot of poetry. I ran a unique poetry journal for a number of years. But after reading thousands of submissions, I tired of it. In college Harrison’s slim collection was a bit of a watershed moment for me, as I paced alongside someone else talking himself out of suicide. It’s a tremendous pleasure to return to the collection.

But also: I’m a first class technogeek, and as a programmer I’m close to the machine. I’ve begun to wonder about its effect on my health — the constant connectivity, the loss of orality, the endless stream of ‘small’ thoughts. My memory does not seem to be what it used to. I do not remember peoples’ names, words I know I know dissipate into a fog — but none of this matters, right? Because I live in a machine-assisted world. As my own brain spends more time with information synthesis, I rely on my devices to store that information in increasing amounts. Remember when you used to know a dozen phone numbers?

But after listening to Benjamen Walker interview Douglas Rushkoff about his book Present Shock (NYT review) (listen to the podcast here, it’s worth it), where many of my half-formed thoughts on our weird present were clarified, I decided to make some changes to ensure that my mind had time to wander much more effectively into deep waters (where, I think, the interesting stuff happens). I’m cutting back on the information I comb through. I’m keeping my phone pocketed more. I’m challenging myself with memorization which I think could be considered a sort of meditation (my mother, a yoga teacher and lifelong meditator might probably challenge this…), but which I also consider to be just good brain muscle-building (here is a great article on why we should memorize poetry from the New Yorker).

I am attempting to better synthesize what ought to remain personally important from what is not.

The goal is to have memorized the whole book of 40 poems (phew!). This is in part inspired by Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, in which the main character Thomas Cromwell is said to have the entire New Testament committed to heart. And also a shout out to Laura, with whom I discuss these things, and who is currently asking her high school students memorize work.

Happy National Poetry Month!

Cyberpunk: Stories of Hardware, Software, Wetware, Revolution and Evolution.

I contributed a story called Los Pepenedores, about a kid living in a Mexico City dump in a future where androids are sent  to the dumps to reclaim rare materials that the past threw out. I’m really proud of it. The rest of the collection is outstanding, and I feel honored to be included with such masters whose names you will no doubt recognize the majority of (I’m in line right behind Jonathan Lethem!).

The cover / TOC below. Check it out!

Powell’s | Local bookstore | Amazon

I can’t begin to say how happy I am to have Sherwood Nation delivered (thanks Eddie!). It’s been a long haul on this book, which I started  in earnest during a two month trip to Brazil in 2009, influenced greatly by visiting favelas there. The book was written pretty much entirely in daily short episodes before dawn and has grown much longer than my original conception of it, to officially be, at least word-count-wise, a large book (~500 pages/160k words). I also consider it to be a ‘big book’, at least in my book, but I suppose that’s for the world to determine. I’m also very happy to have yet another book very much on its way (The Voyage, in collaboration with David Naimon) and a fourth in its infancy. Things feel, as they say, to be rolling.

There was a dark period in my writing life after the completion of Couch (~2006) until 2009. Having to do with, in unequal parts, the raising of young children, general artistic malaise, and an interest in other projects. In my 2009 Brazil trip I did a sort of reboot and have kept a disciplined schedule since, turning out, I’m guessing, about a half million words since if you count short stories, rewrites, and work on the novels. While this is certainly way less than many writers, considering how busy my life is I’m very content with the progress.

Sherwood Nation takes place in Portland, Oregon, a town I love. What do they say?: If you love something, first destroy it, and then rebuild it?  I’m sure you will hear much more about the book in the coming months.

Hurrah!

In addition to being a renowned author, poet and essayist, Grace Paley was an ardent political activist and all-around sassy broad. Celebrating what would have been her 90th birthday, local authors and fans—including Ben Parzybok, Constance Hall, Harold Johnson, Khanh Pham, Laura Moulton, Liz Woody, Michael Heald, Sandy Polishuk and Steve Williams—will read a collection of Paley’s work and screen the documentary Grace Paley: Collected Shorts. This event will be the last of the annual gatherings. — Willamette Week

There will also be a film. December 11th at 7pm, admission is free! Read more here. If you come, say hi.

On November 27th at 8pm at the Waypost (3120 N. Williams Ave), as the public component of our RACC grant, David Naimon and I will be reading from our novel-in-progress, The Voyage, and talking about the process of co-authoring fiction.

It all started rather innocently in 2010 when we thought it might be fun to try to co-write a short piece of fiction. We started by passing it back and forth, chipping in a few hundred words at a time, building it piece by piece. Fast forward to now, some hundred thousand words, a Regional Arts and Culture Council grant, and many heated creative arguments later, and we’d like to share a little bit of what we’ve been working on.

There will be some quibbling, there will be some beer drinking, and there will be some reading… if I’m not mistaken this will be David’s first public reading. So come see!

We hope you’ll join us!

Here’s the Facebook Event page  and  Here are directions to the Waypost

Bear & Shifty – published at Lightspeed Magazine (if you’d rather have audio, the podcast of this story will launch in a week or so)

and The Coder (this was originally in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and the kind folks at Small Beer Press just remade it as a podcast)

But it has no easy learning curve, especially if you’re not a techie. What I find most interesting about Git is that as human knowledge accumulates and as  scientists are conceivably unable to know all of the requisite fields to draw new incredible cross-disciplinary revelations, that the combined, de-centralized brain of a Git project might allow for discoveries once science is beyond the scope of our own ability to synthesize it. Cool.

I like the idea of government running off of git, though it’s a little hard to imagine what would precipitate that type of power shift. However, where there’s not a huge power difference between parties, it can be an ideal platform. Writing software is very similar to writing novels, in my mind. They’re often big and sprawling multi-year projects where one loses track of various threads. You constantly battle against a sea of information. I can certainly imagine co-writing a future novel in Git.

I sold my first book to Small Beer Press without an agent. In fact I was their first (and only?) book ever snagged from the  slush pile, dripping wet with ice-slurry, surely. It worked great — but I’ve been interested in obtaining an agent for the long-arc of a writing career, and that came to a head with the completion of Sherwood Nation.

But strangely, getting an agent was more difficult than getting a book accepted. (look at Eddie’s acceptance stats) I had agents make polite overtones, but otherwise indicate that while they liked my writing, they just weren’t sure where books like mine (Couch) would go. Where would it even get shelved? In this day and age though, books of bent genre are everywhere — and Small Beer Press is one of the ground-breakers there (with Kelly Link, of course, but most recently Maureen McHugh’s new collection). And it’s clear from reading his bio that Eddie and I see eye to eye on the matter.

Now, to get a book ship-shape!

Here’s a link to the news at the National Book Foundation: 2012 Innovations in Reading Award Winners.

Now I just need to start mentioning how useful my presence might be at the awards ceremony in NYC this fall (bag carrier, message taker, clothes presser?)…

We’re substantially into the long process and have done some incredible world-building on a world I’m really excited about.

This weekend I learned that RACC (The Regional Arts and Culture Council) said yes to our grant proposal. We’re funded! Toot toot!

I’m sure you will hear more about this as we go — part of the grant requires that we host a public performance from the piece. Likely we’ll also chat about the pleasures and difficulties of doing together what is traditionally a very isolated, solo art. Fortunately for us, David and I know how to argue productively. Though by the end, who knows, Kung Fu may become necessary.

If you wish to see a short summary of our work (or how much $$ we got), you can see all awarded grants here. Do an in-document search for my name.

And writers: As I begun the grant process, I didn’t even realize that RACC supported literary projects. I can’t recommend highly enough how accessible RACC was during this time, and how much they seemed invested in my success. Here’s a quote from Ingrid Carlson, a Grants Officer at RACC, who wrote me the following:

“First, let me say that we offer the same percentage of Project Grants in the literary discipline as we offer in every other discipline.  The challenge is that we only receive a very small handful of applications from literary artists, as opposed to a discipline like visual arts.  We fund about 40% of the literary arts applications – the same as in other categories.  The problem is that we average about 7 literary project grants and only a couple from individuals each year.  It would be great to get more!”

Subtle hint…

Thanks Ingrid & RACC!