my (small press) writing day: Sheldon Lee Compton : Repose In a Tattered Recline...

my (small press) writing day: Sheldon Lee Compton : Repose In a Tattered Recline...: Briefly, How I Got Here In the First Place When I started writing, back in 1987, I used my grandmother’s Singer sewing machine as ...

FISSURES in the mail and an upcoming interview with the author, Timothy Dodd

Checked the mail a few days ago and was pleased to find a signed and personalized copy of Timothy Dodd's short story collection Fissures.

This book of Tim's was just released from Bottom Dog Press, the same publisher of my first novel Brown Bottle.

I'll be reading this while continuing my interview with Tim. We've been talking back and forth for a couple weeks now and I'll be publishing that interview here at Bent Country and a couple other places - likely PLUMB and Enclave. In any case, I'll post the links here when it goes live.

In the meantime, go HERE and order Fissures.

Alban Fischer included my story in the new issue of Trnsfr's Sip Cup

I've been a huge fan of Alban Fischer for years now. He is both a talented writer and an amazing graphic design artist. Check out some of his book covers at his link up there. 

I recently trolled around and came across Trnsfr Books, in particular the feature there called Sip Cup. Admittedly I didn't really look closely when I submitted a story to them a short while back. I had no idea who the editors were. I found out soon after that Alban was involved with them, so I was happy as all hell that he liked my short story "This Story Isn't About That Stone" for this most recent issue of Sip Cup.

HERE is the issue with my story, and thanks in advance for giving it a read. Also, read the other works included. It's all golden. And Alban is doing some creative stuff with this, and, not surprisingly, some beautiful stuff, too.

I can't do graphic design but I can use Canva and make myself feel like I can. So here's a cover.

So I'm writing a horror/detective novel called The Omega Problem. The main character is a small town journalist turned investigator named Bishop Ford. He's tracking a serial killer who may be more than anyone bargains for in the end. Here's a mock up cover I did with Canva this evening. You know, for fun.

A Cormac McCarthy Reading Plan

I rarely engage a reading plan. I tend to go in hot and cold streaks with different kinds of books. Lately, it's been horror novels and short stories, which I love. However, these due tend to veer away from style and focus more on narrative. The result is I start missing the great stylists and have to pick up a couple other books along the way such as those by Lydia Davis or Michael Ondaatje.

So I've reached that point again with my horror reading period. To balance it, I've decided to start on Cormac McCarthy's ten novels. I truly want nothing to do with his plays or screen treatments marketed as novels such as The Sunset Limited, The Stonemason, or The Counselor. Call be snobbish, but I want Cormac the novelist in his full glory, where he's most effective and potent.

Here's something to confess: I've only read one of his books so far. Child of God. I liked it, but wasn't interested in continuing with him at that time. Now I'm ready. I say ready because I know this means I'll have to read The Road. And I don't want to read The Road. I'm never ever going to see the movie. But I'll have to put this book under my belt, I guess. I'm just not thrilled by stories that put children in danger for long periods of narrative time.  Especially fathers and sons. I have fathers and sons issues. Thanks Dad.

But, all this being said, what have you all to add to the conversation. I'm keen to hear what some of you think about his work, those of you who have read more than I have at this point. Am I about to come face to face with the greatest American novelist?

Cowboy Jamboree nominates excerpt of DYSPHORIA for a Pushcart Prize

Well, it's nearing year end and my beard is growing in nicely and the Pushcart news is at my doorstep once again. This time coming from the genuinely amazing Adam Van Winkle and Constance Beitzel at Cowboy Jamboree Magazine.


The announcement came in today that the excerpt of my novel Dysphoria, published this past year at CJ Magazine, was chosen by Adam for a Pushcart Prize nomination. The novel itself was published by CJ Press earlier this year as its debut launch, a tremendous honor that is still resonating for me these months later.

I simply cannot overstate how much Adam and his press have come to mean to me. My work has been championed in ways I never thought possible, and done so tirelessly and with as much enthusiasm as I could have ever hoped for. And the rest of the CJ Press family - Ben Drevlow (buy his wonderful novel Ina-Baby tonight), Adam himself (grab a copy of his book Hardway Juice), and future stable mates Daren Dean and Joey Poole - the rest of the family have become good friends, invaluable colleagues, and sources of inspiration along the way.


It's a special atmosphere. The feel of something new and exciting is always tingling just around the corner, and Adam's vision for what he wants for his press is the most focused I've ever seen. The sky is truly the limit and I'm just happy to be along for the mile-high ride.

Here's CJ Press's catalog page - check out the titles.

New story "I Am Not the Fist" published today @ Fish Bowl

This is the second story of mine Fish Bowl has published, and I'm as grateful this time as I was the last.

The first story was "Into the Mystic" and the story today is "I Am Not the Fist."

I'd love if you read them both, but surely the new one, if you've already seen the first. Below is the link:

"I Am Not the Fist" @ Fish Bowl

The Happy Hunting Ground: An excerpt from THE ORCHARD IS FULL OF SOUND

Last night I dreamed of the “happy hunting ground.”

He is thrust into the place of bones. These bones that look human but are not. They are different because, he sees now, the skulls are all wrong. But the rest of the bones are normal—legs, ribcage, bits of arms, shoulder blades. But what of this place? More tunnel than anything else, in the way a tunnel hides a promise of light directly within the darkness of its mouth. Following this promise, he moves ahead, no longer studying the skulls so closely, remembering, memorizing, the legs, ribcages, arms, shoulder blades, each part of each former person as tarnished pearls in the black.

When he at last emerges from the tunnel he is met with the most perfect spring day, an environment with the sweetest air and water, but a spring day that shimmers and then changes to the most perfect summer day where in the dry heat the deer make dust in the road.  Predictably, here comes cooler weather and the fog of fall with good leaves.

It’s a place called Virgie, but it could be Milton. Small town is small town. In this small town the railroad tracks move forward to the vanishing point and splits two giants of the great range—John Attic Ridge and Abner Mountain. The scent of creosote comes up in waves from the treated ties. As far as twenty yards out from the tunnel, the cool breeze moves in a wall against him. A coating of sweat turns cold on the back of his neck, and he is at that moment aware of the rabbits.

Across an expanse of bottom field at nearly the same level as the Big Sandy tributary running behind it, no less than two dozen rabbits stop all at once, spread out a few feet from each other and, seeing him, begin to beat the ground. But after no more than a few seconds of this, in perfect synchronization, they flop into the trimmed grass of the field, chin the ground for a bit, and then begin dancing, actually spinning in the air.

Seeing all the activity out in the open by so many rabbits, he raises his hand, his finger pointing forward like a barrel, the thumb held up like a hammer, and fires off three pretend shots into the bottom field. At once three of the rabbits begin to spin slowly and fall stiffly backward, their front feet cartoonishly clutching their chests before going entirely limp. He can’t remember ever seeing rabbits behave this way, but it was nice to be hunting again, so he fires off three more shots and three more rabbits pretend die. Then all six rabbits roll over in the grass and regain their lazy beating of the ground.

There is the strong urge to tell his mother about the rabbits. And you could shoot without a gun, never kill, but the rabbits would do a little dance, all as if it were a game, and they were playing it too. As he begins the letter to his mother in his mind, how he would explain this strange place and these strange animals, the season turns again. Winter with heavy powder-snow as the railroad tracks disappear beneath the weight; that thick scent of creosote doesn’t fade away as much as turn off as if captured in an unseen vacuum. It is replaced with the crisp sensualities of cold. When the snow stops he can see he’s at the summit of John Attic Ridge.

The summit is profoundly quiet. The mountain descends in sharp slopes all around him. The trees, the sky, the mineral flesh of the soil, the foliage—everything is white. When the first animal comes into view, it’s a big deer. The buck is heavy-horned and clumping along under its weight and power and constantly lip curling to get at the wind. It is also entirely white, including the beams and tines of its rack. A closer look reveals that even its eyes are coma white.

In line behind the buck are other animals, all white, including a small herd of goats, two thoroughbreds, and a massive and lumbering buffalo with a head like flaming torch of cotton. The horses are only visible within all the white when their tight muscles draw together to create the hint of grayish lines along their bodies. He grieves to tell someone how the buffalo snorted, tossed their heads from somewhere in the snowblind, to explain how it seemed a kind of language sharing a kind of secret.

All of a sudden he is tired, and materializing there on his side is his Army blanket. It is rolled tight and fixed to his waist by three shoestrings tied together in reef knots. There’s no question that he will bed down here on the summit in the snow, and so he is asleep nearly before he is flat on the ground. This is where he will write later he dreamed within the dream.

At Fleety’s she tells him the story of the bones. If he could have remembered the perfect spring and the dry summer and the white devouring everything in the winter he would have shared this with Fleety. But all he could remember where the bones inside the long tunnel. The skulls. This is why he felt it was a predetermined event, her telling him about the only thing he could remember from where he had been. He believes in fate, intervention, and destiny; he knows these are some of God’s tools to understanding.

The bones were poor people killed by bandits, Fleety explains.

He listens to her, but everything she says after explaining the bones comes in muffled bursts like a coughing fit into a pillow. Finally she takes him by the hand and at once they are both deep inside the tunnel where he started from. The bones are there, just as before, walls of legs, shoulder blades, fingers, hip bones. The skulls are more misshapen than before, less human. They are lighted in the dark by the faintly pearled tarnish. There is much about the bones that are the same, but there is more that is different now.

He has no time to study the bones or the tunnel walls closely. Fleety guides him to a place he must have overlooked the first time. She moves aside and allows him to enter this new place under a huge rock where no light should have shown. When he is standing fully inside the space, two things become clear: he is in a cave and he is irreversibly alone.

In this cave where light should be a fable, he finds a dogwood tree. It glows the kind of red those trees get at sundown and the buds are purple in that weird light. The scene holds his attention fast, even as the distant thumping of footsteps starts up behind him inside the darkness of the tunnel. By the time he looks away from the dogwood tree and turns to the sound of the footsteps, there is little time to do anything other than throw up his arms in a weak defense.

His forearms go instantly numb. Flecks of blood splatter his cheeks and forehead, warm at first and then drying and cooling. And then he sees the instrument swooping downward again toward his outstretched arms—a pick axe, but one much larger than usual.

The man holding the axe was much larger than usual too. Clearly mad as a hatter, he swung the weapon in bursts, crushing and chopping at the skulls. All the while he is yelling, explaining that he is trying to make them human-looking.

 Then I went back to the other side of both dreams.

Gillian Walker interviewed me @ Vestal Review

I talked with Gillian Walker over at Vestal Review recently. We discussed strange stories, the short story, legacy, and a bunch of other stuff. She was great. Here's the link to go and have a look.

An essay from my upcoming Breece D'J Pancake book today @ Secret History Books

Mike Lafontaine published an essay from my book-in-progress The Orchard Is Full of Sound today at Secret History Books. It's about Breece D'J Pancake and will be published soon by West Virginia University Press.

Here's where to go to read it.

And thanks.

"Better" from Michael Chin's new short story collection YOU MIGHT FORGET THE SKY WAS EVER BLUE

Joel won the third grade spelling bee. The prize: the right to name the class the goldfish. He called her Mother.

When no one was looking, he took Mother from her bowl and crushed her beneath the weight of his social studies textbook.


Dad knocked on Joel’s door while Joel was masturbating. Joel had suspected the squeak of his bed springs was audible from outside his bedroom and had suspected his father might wary of washing cum stains from the pillowcase. Even so, Joel had hoped it was one of those things that he would never have to talk about with his father.

To his credit, Dad didn’t say anything, and Joel read the knock as a warning sign, like the police cars that waited in plain sight at the side of the road. The good cops cared more about maintaining order than collecting fines.


Joel met a purple-haired girl in his dorm, with white scars on her thighs like veins. Like lightning. He liked to touch them, just the way he played with the indentations the elastic waistbands of his tighty-whities left against his skin. She asked him not to touch, but he touched her anyway when he thought she had fallen asleep. She cried.

She told him she used to cut herself.

She asked if he wanted to go.

That she would tell him this made him feel like he might cry. This trust. This knowledge. It had to be love.


The next girl was softer. Her hair as brown as tree trunks and smelling of honey. She wore it long, often braided. They caught the biggest, coldest snowflakes of the season on their tongues.

Joel’s hands bled when they climbed trees that spring. He had never formed the calluses she had. Never been an outdoor child.

They spent the summer apart, but talked on the phone most days, until he ran out of things to say and she said that was okay, it was enough to hear him breathe.

In the fall he got drunk on whiskey for the first time and told her that he didn’t think she was very pretty and that her feet smelled.


Joel wrote bullet point descriptions for a company that sold traffic cones, hard hats, safety glasses, and harnesses.

Selling durability. Selling comfort.

He never slept enough. Started each day with a Centrum and a cigarette. The combination of the two on an empty stomach made him nauseous.


They couldn’t afford a honeymoon so they each took two sick days after the ceremony and fucked one another raw. Joel littered her clavicle with bite marks. Amy slept with her cheek on his chest, frizzy brown hair in his face. He sneezed, but didn’t move her. Dried the mucus with the back of his left hand. Petted her hair with the palm of his right.


Joel managed salesmen of safety vests and work boots. Same company. Different hallway. Office with a window. Sometimes he squinted his eyes and tried to see past that same lot where he had parked his car year after year, and tried to see back to the moment he became this round-bellied, gray-haired thing.

His stomach pained him. Like usual. Amy started his days with eggs or pancakes or French toast or corned beef. He ate it all. Without fail, between nine-thirty and ten-thirty he needed to shit. Sometimes, when he knew he had a morning meeting, he tried to force it out before he left home, or first thing in the office. It never satisfied him. Nature had to run its course. By the end of the meeting, sweat streaked his back as he squeezed his ass cheeks shut, smiling, red-faced, waiting it out.


Joel’s daughter peed all the time. They called her Penelope and he wondered if the name sounded too much like pee-pee and tempted the gods of urination. He had thought he’d relish the day she graduated from diapers, but it only meant that he needed to pull over the car more often, stop in the middle of grocery shopping to find the ladies room.

Still, he loved her. They taught her how to ride a bike. How to build snowmen. Against his wife’s protests that one or both of them would end up with a broken neck, how to climb trees.


They called their second daughter Jessie. The sound of a boy’s name in lieu of a boy. All of these women. Joel didn’t know what to do with them past a certain point. The great divide between child and woman where everything changed.

But before she grew, while she belonged to him, little Jessie seemed to crave him. She nestled at his side while he watched baseball. Fell asleep, the back of her head to the space just outside his armpit, knees tucked beneath her chin. He held her close. Through the rain delay. Through the final innings. Through the late night news. He would not risk moving and waking his perfect girl.

As his bladder filled and his eyelids drifted shut, he ran his fingertips over the ridges her socks had impressed on her little ankles.


Seventy-four minutes into the DVD, Joel realized that Penelope hadn’t gotten up once to relieve herself.

Unheard of.

He sat on the couch with a big red plastic bowl of popcorn.

Penelope sat on the loveseat. Green bowl of popcorn on the floor. Cuddled close under a red and black plaid blanket with her boyfriend. Their whole bodies were covered, faces peeking out, colored in flickering TV light.

Joel suggested they take off the blanket.

Penelope said she was cold.

Joel said they could get up and get another blanket. Have one for each of them. Two even. The hallway closet was full of them.

Joel made eye contact with his daughter and he knew what hatred felt like. He shoveled popcorn in his mouth and sucked the butter from his fingers.


Jessie, Joel’s golden child, made good. She delivered unto him a grandson, called Bray.

He asked her what kind of name that was. She said it was a roar.

Joel shrugged and held the boy face to face, when his roars had not yet evolved to words, but remained whimpers and wails. When he could open his eyes just wide enough to see his grandfather. When the child might just recognize the feel of human hands around his tiny rib cage, and just might begin to know love.

When Bray was five Jessie brought home a puppy, and the boy got to name him. Joel sipped coffee, turned beige with so much cream—the only way his stomach could handle it. He listened as Jessie explained that you named creatures after people you cared for. After people you admired. It was a way of distilling your love. Spreading that name so it might touch others.

Bray named the dog Grandpa. From that day forward, the boy and his dog were inseparable.

And Joel knew then this boy would do it all better.



originally published @ Extract [s]

***

Michael Chin was born and raised in Utica, New York and currently lives in Las Vegas with his wife and son. He has three full-length short story collections on the way: You Might Forget the Sky was Ever Blue (Duck Lake Books) available for pre-sale HERE, Circus Folk (Hoot 'n' Waddle), and The Long Way Home (Cowboy Jamboree Press). He has also published three chapbooks: Autopsy and Everything After with The Florida Review, Distance Traveled with Bent Window Books, and The Leo Burke Finish with Gimmick Press. Find him online at miketchin.com and follow him on Twitter @miketchin.

October needs to be kind of big here at Bent Country

Come October this blog will officially turn 10 years old. A decade of writing and posting here. Help me plan something. Leave comments to make suggestions. If I get no comments (which, of course, is possible) I'll just do a simple post or something. Maybe a picture of a kid blowing out 10 candles or something.

Guest Post: Why Write Stories by Michael Chin

I write stories because I’m scared. Global warming is going to end the world if the president doesn’t do us in first. I’m powerless in these things. As powerless as I was, twelve years old, when a group of five punk teenagers, one, two, three years older than me, wearing Halloween masks jumped out from behind a hedge to give my friend and I a scare when we were out for a walk. They didn’t do much—just pushed us around a little, probably cursed at us. The moment stuck in my mind, though because they’d caught us—must have been waiting on us, because it was a sleepy street without much foot traffic, and they could have given us a pounding, stolen our wallets if they wanted to. Of course, the other truth of the matter is that I ran. In principle, I’d like to think that if my friend was going to get his ass kicked, I’d at least keep him company getting mine kicked, too, but in that moment of fight or flight, there’s no mistaking which instinct my six-foot-tall, hundred-thirty-pound body picked up on. My friend was shorter, squatter, slower, didn’t have the same option.

I write stories fast. I’ve always been fast. A fast talker. Fast to pick up my multiplication tables. A fast runner. The last day of kindergarten, the teachers staged a series of foot races and I won every one I ran, last of all a race with every kindergartner running across the same field at the same time. It’s the best story I’ve got from my athletic career, the greatest glory achieved a few months shy of my sixth birthday.

I could tell you the story of when my uncle gifted me a stopwatch on the premise that he knew I was at the age when boys ran races. I wasn’t. I was sixteen and couldn’t remember the last race I’d raced someone, but I smiled and nodded along because gifts were scarce in my family and in that era before smart phones or laptops, a stopwatch was a cool gadget to have, even if I had no discernible use for it. I nodded along, too, when the same uncle told me that I should have played on my high school basketball team because I probably would have been good—a comment predicated on the fact that I was the first person in my family to stand taller than five-nine, a comment oblivious to my complete lack of physical coordination. When I said I wanted to be a writer, that uncle told me I ought to take a penname, because no one would want to buy books by someone with the last name Chin.

I write because it runs in the family. Not just the Star Trek fan fiction my mother wrote before I was born, nor the romance novels my sister took to publishing in her thirties. Not just the abandoned, hand-written manuscript about gambling I found in my father’s desk drawer, or the book about how to quit gambling that my uncle self-published.

I suppose gambling runs in the family, too.

Maybe that has something to do with my stories, too. Maybe that’s how I wound up in Vegas.

I’ve never been much of a gambler myself—just five-dollar buy-in games of Texas Hold ‘Em over kitchen tables and video poker the once or so a year I found myself in a casino. But when I approached a decade out of undergrad and had scarcely published and felt all my youthful potential as a writer slipping through my fingers, I gambled on leaving a stable, well-paying office job behind in favor of moving across the country to do an MFA and put my writing first. The woman I was dating came along and we lived together for the first time. I read and wrote and lesson planned for Freshman Comp by day, and came home to her to watch old episodes of Beverly Hills 90210 at night. Idyllic days, humble as they may have been.

Three years out of grad school, two years into adjuncting, I got an interview for a job I’d applied for on a lark, teaching writing at UNLV. There was a song from the Sara Bareilles musical, Waitress, in my head when I boarded the plane for my campus interview, the song, “Take It From an Old Man,” the lyrics, “Bet it all on yourself at least one time, ‘cause honey win or lose, it’s one hell of a ride.”

I bet.

I won.

I got the job. We packed up and moved—that same woman who’d moved with me to Oregon, who’s moved back east with me, married me, carried the financial load while I was teaching part time, and not least of all—heck, most of all—had carried our son to birth.

I write because my wife’s stories deserve to get told in a way that sticks past oral telling, in a way that rings more authentic than what’s technically true. In print. I write stories so that my son might come to know me in the years ahead in the way I know best how to express myself and so that he knows sooner than I believed in it myself that his stories do matter, do carry weight.

Stories tell families. Stories tell fears—better than chasing them away, they live in them, making them no less scary in content, but maybe a little less bleak for yielding a sense of understanding.

I'm not powerless in that.

And so, I write stories.

***

Michael Chin was born and raised in Utica, New York and currently lives in Las Vegas with his wife and son. He has three full-length short story collections on the way: You Might Forget the Sky was Ever Blue (Duck Lake Books) available for pre-sale HERE, Circus Folk (Hoot 'n' Waddle), and The Long Way Home (Cowboy Jamboree Press). He has also published three chapbooks: Autopsy and Everything After with The Florida Review, Distance Traveled with Bent Window Books, and The Leo Burke Finish with Gimmick Press. Find him online at miketchin.com and follow him on Twitter @miketchin.

Leslie Jamison quoting John Irving about the usefulness of sentimentality.

"In a 1979 op-ed called “In Defense of Sentimentality,” John Irving examines the legacy of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, stressing the importance of what he calls “Christmas risks”: earnest attempts to articulate pathos without cloaking it in cleverness or wit."

                                                                                           
                                                                 - Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

Mike Lafontaine again sees something in one of my stories

Mike Lafontaine has once again saw something in a story of mine that most everyone else missed. Nothing against the rest of you all, but Mike has a eye tailor-made for my kind of storytelling. And I'm lucky because of that skill.

This most recent story is called "Psychic Mountains Ten Thousand Feet High." Follow the link and give it a read.

Thanks again Mike. You are a rare jewel, my friend.

Gonzalo Baeza wrote about my book in The Observer

Here's the link to read it:

Read Gonzalo

It's a great day. I have a short story called "To the Cherokee Strip" in BULL Magazine.

Bull Magazine is one of my absolute favorite journals. It was, and still is, a dream journal of mine. Beginning in 2009 I started submitting to them at least twice a year. Sometimes more. Today my third story was published there, thanks to editor and writer Ben Drevlow.

This one is my second published western story. It's called "To the Cherokee Strip" and it was helped along greatly by Ben's editorial eye. My first western story was also published at BULL.  It's titled "Seven Drums" and you can read it here). These are the first two stories of a planned collection of western stories. I'm working on the third now. It's titled "The Judas Steer" and, yes, I'm excited about this project. I love the Old West and the way a western story opens itself up to discovering the grays within the supposed black and white hats.

So link up and give "To the Cherokee Strip" and "Seven Drums" a read. I thank you.

I enjoy Ben Drevlow's work and you will too. Do some linking.

Ben has work online at Split Lip here, at Fiction on the Web here, at Rock Bottom Journal here, at Hothouse here, at NEAT here, at Hobo Pancakes here, at Caffeine Press here, at The Los Angeles Review of Los Angeles here, at Profane here, and at Fiction Southeast here.

I have a new story called "Pepper" today in Barren Magazine's new issue.

It's been a long day. Put in more than ten hours at the day job. Did some major emailing when I got home (book stuff). Throw in the two-hour commute and the fact that my day started at 5 a.m. and you've got one tired 43 year old let me tell you.

It's been so busy today I've hardly had time to mention that one of my favorite stories I've written in a long time was published today at Barren Magazine. It's called "Pepper" and I started writing it because I wanted to remember times tossing baseball with my mom at Lulie Bate's trailer park on Indian Creek in Pike County, Kentucky.

I managed to do everything I wanted to do with this story. All the feelings I wanted to bring back to the surface were brought back to the surface; all the nostalgia was there in full; all the reasons it wanted to be a story were readily available to me as I plugged along on it.

I'm proud of the story. And Meagan Lucas, the fiction editor who helped me shape the final draft published today, was as valuable as an editor as I've ever experienced. She handled herself like a pro and served up pro-level help. It made the story that much better. Please do go see for yourself. Follow the link below and read "Pepper" and then cruise the rest of the Barren's Issue 9.

Read "Pepper"

Leave a comment and let me know what you think of the story. I'd love to hear from you.

My story "Into the Mystic" published today at Fish Bowl Press

I love getting involved early and often with new journals and new presses. So often really unique stories can be found here.

Today I had the pleasure of seeing my short story "Into the Mystic" published at Fish Bowl Press.

Also, another cool thing is that each story gets a drawing specific to it with a nice title page and everything. To left here is the drawing they did for mine.

I'd love if you stopped by and had a look at their journal. Below is the link to my story, but roam around and enjoy all the content.

Fish Bowl Press - "Into the Mystic"

Yes, I googled myself. But look what I found!

I googled myself yesterday. It wasn't the first time and it won't be the last. I have a busy online life and so I like to see what's humming out there and how it might be connected to me.

The result yesterday was by far my favorite.

An artist named Amy Elizabeth (I suspect there might be a last name missing there but can't be sure) she posted one of her paintings at a website called PicoMico. Below is the painting.

Pretty amazing right? You know it. She explains that it's about corruption, in particular regarding the recent idiot politicians and their idiot views and actions about abortion. Right on, I say. She said the painting was also inspired by my short story "The Wolf and Two Rabbits" published a few years ago at Occulum. 

Check out the rest of Amy's work. Here's a link to her page over at PicoMico.

Dysphoria Makes the 31 New & Upcoming Indie Book Picks from a Top Goodreads Reviewer

So my good friend and champion of small presses far and wide Lori Hettler posted on Goodreads her book picks for new and upcoming titles on Goodreads yesterday. To my great pleasure, included among these 31 picks was my novel Dysphoria. It's only the second list I've made for one of my books. I like the feeling. Thanks for this, Lori!

SEE LORI'S 31 PICKS

My new short story collection ABSOLUTE INVENTION available now from Secret History Books. Buy it today @ Amazon

A few new words about my new novel Dysphoria, out now from Cowboy Jamboree Press

I'm woefully behind on making hay about my new novel, Dysphoria, from Cowboy Jamboree Press. I've mentioned it a lot on social media, but not here, at my home.

Please buy Dysphoria: An Appalachian Gothic @ Amazon

If posts and messages are to be trusted (and these are trustworthy people) a lot of people are buying and reading the book. That makes an author happy.

I really don't know how to keep talking about it at this point. I started the first chapter when I was 18 years old, moderating a fiction discussion group via America Online during my senior year of high school. The story that became the chapter that became the book was called "The Son" and it was the first time I had written with my dad in mind. Of course if you've read anything by me since I started having my writing published you'll see that the theme has pervaded for nearly three decades.

Another chance to please buy Dysphoria: An Appalachian Gothic @ Amazon

Dysphoria is the work in which I deal most heavily with my dad, exploring him, his mind, asking questions about what it would actually take to make a person like that a personal like that. That's most I've ever talked about the origins of this book. And the most I probably ever will.

My story published today at mosh lit. Many thanks to editor and writer Patrick Trotti

Below is the link to read the story. Also, please do have a look around as mosh lit is new to the scene. Throw Patrick some support and share his content, help him build an audience.

My story "Donna 💗 Morris 4Ever" at mosh lit

New story in current issue of Cowboy Jamboree Magazine

My short story "The Burning Torch in Yonder Turret Stands" is the new issue of Cowboy Jamboree Magazine Issue 4.2 "Grotesque to Art".

Visit and give the entire issue a read.  Scroll down to find the option to download the issue as a PDF.

Many thanks as always to Adam Van Winkle, my brother from another mother.

Order DYSPHORIA @ Amazon, please and thank you. And learn more @ Cowboy Jamboree Press.

Here's the link to where you can find out more @ Cowboy Jamboree Press:

MORE INFO @ CJ PRESS

Here's the link to where you can order @ Amazon

ORDER @ AMAZON

Add DYSPHORIA @ Goodreads, please and thank you

 

   

     
   
 
 
 

Satantango by László Krasznahorkai
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I loved the ending of this and I'm tempted to pop it up to four stars but I didn't have that sensation of being drawn back to it for more reading. I kind of wanted to finish it and get to the next book. Three it is. But damn that ending.


View all my reviews

Old Dead Things

I'm spending the day reading about the trilobite. I mean really really reading about it. I'm writing a section of The Orchard Is Full of Sound over the next few days that deals heavily in trilobite history.

The section, one of three labeled Fictive Perspectives, will follow the last trilobite's final journey to its forever resting place. Paralleled will be Breece's first trip in the woods to search for one of the trilobite fossils, focusing on his idea of connections with the past and how "old dead things" provide his ideas of those connections.

It's a risk, which, for me, means it's officially worth trying. I'm tempted to say more about the section but I think I may have already said too much. But then it's just us talking, so I think it'll be okay.

Hello you five or six readers. We're going to sort this thing out.

Not a lot of people dropping by to read my posts here. It makes me feel strange to continue writing posts. Not bad or not hurt, etc. Just strange.

I remember when I started Bent Country about a decade ago things were about the same. I often addressed my one follower by name. It felt intimate and interactive. I'm back to that, so maybe it's not really strange as much as it is surreal.

That being said, to the five or six of you who have dropped by for the last several posts, you're in for a ride, my friends. Well not really. I'll probably be posting the same kinds of things about writing and from time to time stuff about space like white dwarf stars and how we don't have a black dwarf star yet because it's takes longer for one to form than the universe has been a thing.

Oh, and expect abrupt stops without warning because I don't always have a witty or informative or literary way to end posts here. I just stop writing so

Got me some ARC action for my new novel DYSPHORIA. It’ll be dropping on April 30 from Cowboy Jamboree Press.

FRIDAY BLACK Goodreads rating, review

Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This would have been a five-star rating if Saunders as an influence wasn't so obvious. Still, good stories, but you couldn't put Saunders name on the cover and I might not have noticed anything was up. It'll be good to see what he does once he sheds those grad school habits and author-love.


View all my reviews

Cool quote from BLACK FRIDAY by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

There's a lot to love about Black Friday. But I will say that it's really easy to see the influence of George Saunders on Adjei-Brenyah's stories. It'll be interesting to see where he goes once that influence wears off. In the meantime, I really liked this insightful moment from the book:

"I think having had money, and then having lost it, and had it again, and lost it some more, some older people kind of just say, Screw it, I’m going to smile."

From cited to included. My story "Aversion" selected for Best Small Fictions 2019

My story “Aversion,” which was published last year at Unbroken, was chosen for Best Small Fictions 2019. Here’s a list of all those included.

I've got a new story at the fantastic Anti-Heroin Chic

I'm late to this one, but I had a story published March 1 at the always interesting Anti-Heroin Chic. The story's called "Here Are Your Heroines" and it was a fun one despite the seriousness of the subject matter. As always, I'm incredibly grateful to James Diaz for accepting this piece. Follow the link below to read the story.

HERE ARE YOUR HEROINES

Susan Choi is interesting.

Here's an article about her latest book True Exercise in Vulture:

Susan Choi on Her Mind-Bending #MeToo Novel

Wrap reveal for DYSPHORIA, due out April 30 from Cowboy Jamboree Press

I have a short story published today at The Ginger Collect for their Issue Nine. It's called "Her Eulogy, Etc." and it has a really long and strange story itself. I'll share that here at some point, but today I just want to shine a light on Lauren and the good people at The Ginger Collect for sharing this one with their readers. Below is a link to read the story and you can also follow it to see the entire issue.

Read "Her Eulogy, Etc."

Tried to move to Tumblr again and failed again. I think I'm actually here to stay.

Well, I tried to switch to Tumblr again. The reason is because the theme Atlantic looks so nice there and there's not an option here that even comes close to such coolness. But, once again I've realized Tumblr's limitations: no pages. That makes it hard to post links to my stories and my reading log.

So I'm back. A decade strong. I stripped the theme down here as plain as possible. Still, it's nothing nearly as minimalistically beautiful as that Atlantic theme.

So I'm about to finish a story I've been working on for a long time (at least for my output lately). It's taken about four months, and I've had the title for much longer than that. It's called "Psychic Mountains Ten Thousand Feet High" and I think I can finish it by tomorrow evening. I think. Things seemed to break loose for it after I got home this evening.

I spent the day helping my gal's dad repair his rental property. I've spent the last three weekends doing this and I'm about tapped out. We've stripped wallpaper, did mud work, primed, and painted every wall in the place. Tomorrow will be putting down carpet. And I'm killed. The place got destroyed by the last folks to rent the place, a bunch of pill head pieces of shit. They basically forced us to redo the entire interior. It's hard work, and made even harder when considering why we're having to do it. It's tough also because I help him on the weekends fix damage done by addicts and then start back on Monday mornings helping by counseling addicts at a clinic in a neighboring county. I'm going to let that thought go. Nothing good can come from me thinking about that dichotomy.

I want to buy around 3,000 books at the present moment. And I'm also beginning to panic at least three times a week when I consider the fact that I'm not going to be able to read those 3,000 books, which make up my Amazon wish list. Again, I've pushed myself into an emotional train wreck of a corner.

Okay, good thoughts, good thoughts, good thoughts. Whatever those are.

Joseph Young’s Always Never Speaking: 50 Flash Fictions

 Joseph Young’s new book, Always Never Speaking: 50 Flash Fictions, with Commentaries by the Author, is now available for preorder.

The book’s 50 very short stories articulates the lives of many characters from numerous shades of life, telling of their pleasures and sorrows, mysteries and loves, in sparing but vivid prose. These stories are collected from among 10+ years of Young’s published and unpublished works. Young also provides very brief commentaries on each of the stories and on the mercurial and beguiling nature of flash fiction itself.

Young is self-publishing his book under the imprint RowHouse Press. Although he is a big fan of traditional publishing houses, Young is compelled with the ideas of DIY art making. Through such projects, artists get to bring their aesthetic ideas not only to the making of their work, but also to the packaging and design of their art and the assembly of novel and creative promotional tools.

As such, Young designed and made the cover art for his book, filmed a book trailer, and created a playlist of sound collage and voice recordings of four stories from Always Never Speaking.

Always Never Speaking is Young’s third full-length book. His award winning book of microfiction, Easter Rabbit, was released by Publishing Genius in 2010, and he self-published his vampire novel, NAME, in 2012. His flash fiction has appeared in many literary journals.

This book is Young’s first major project since his MicroFiction RowHouse in 2017. For MicroFiction RowHouse, Young installed numerous tiny stories on the walls, ceilings, bedsheets, tablecloths, and many other surfaces of his Baltimore rowhome to tell the story of a fictional family who might have once lived in the home.

In the near future, Young will hold a book release party for Always Never Speaking at MicroFiction RowHouse, which has been the site of literary readings, music shows, workshops, and other get-togethers over the past few years.

Always Never Speaking is 220 pages in length, and sells for $15 on Young’s website. During the preorder period for the book, Young will waive the shipping costs.

For media inquiries and requests for review copies, please see the information below.

---------------------

What: Release of Always Never Speaking: 50 Flash Fictions, with Commentaries by the Author

When: Book now available for preorder for $15 on his website (free shipping during preorder), 220 pages

Contact: Joseph Young, youngjoseph21@gmail.com, 443-858-9855

Eating and Watching Baseball and Such

My gmail account won't work properly. Couple this with the fact that my subscription or whatever it is of Microsoft Word lapsed (ended, terminated, skipped out?) Now, consider that I write exclusively on my Google Drive now and you get kind of a calamity: I can't work on my ongoing projects, of which I have a'plenty.

I could write here at Bent Country and then safe it and paste it over whenever things straighten out. But that's not how it works for me. I have to be inside the document. So this sucks.

The truth is that I have to write everyday, not because I'm a writer, but because I just have to and that's it.

***

Ghost Adventures is on. I love that show. It's entertaining and sometimes cool. Investigators who don't like the show don't like it because them boys act crazy and get worked up and claim it's entirely the work of spirits. They also don't like that they say "dude" a lot. Big deal. There are some people who will never be happy as long as they live, and that's the way they way they want it. Don't waste your time on people like that.

*** 

The Braves are 11-12 in spring training play. It's not looking so good. Acuna will have a good year and Freeman probably one or two more decent years. Albies will have more good games than bad, but there will be bad games. The pitching is the problem. Folty is hurt; Terehan needs to be let go or moved to a closer or something, but they'll just keep starting him. Unless something changes with our pitching, this year is going to be a long one. I think I'll focus on Acuna and enjoy watching him. I'd say within a year or two he'll be playing for some other team; I better watch him while I can be happy when he succeeds.

***

My final pass draft of Dysphoria is in Adam's hands now and it's time to work on getting some blurbs for the launch, etc. I asked some people, but I swear to you that I have no idea who still likes me or not. I've lost all sense of that kind of thing. Liked or not liked starts becoming way less important as you get older and I, for one, am thankful for such progress.

I'm having a final look at my draft for an upcoming collection called Absolute Invention for Mike Lafontaine over at Secret History Books. I've not announced anything about this on the social medias but I'm saying it here, for all the millions of my fans and friends who stop by hourly to see what's up with SLC. Well there you go: I'll have a third story collection out this spring in addition to the novel from Cowboy Jamboree. I'm as excited as I've ever been as a writer. And, to the best of my knowledge, I should have The Orchard Is Full of Sound out from WVU Press some time in 2020.

***

I'm hooked on pecan pie lately. It's always been one of my favorite foods, but lately I've been eating it like they'll never make pies again. Wal-Mart is where I'm buying it. These boxes of pies lined up like I don't know, like boxes of heaven, like boxes of pure contentment. I don't know. The catch is having to go to Wal-Mart to get them. I didn't used to have a problem with going there. People never bothered me in large numbers. Now people bother me in any numbers.

It got so bad at one point (I was getting a couple other items for Heather while I was out) that I had to go to the furniture section and rest for a minute in one of those aisles where nobody ever goes. When I had my breath again I headed back out into the dark waters of the Wal-Martian waters.

***

Cross your fingers that I get to start on my writing projects again soon, or there's going to be a lot more of these posts about eating and watching baseball and such.

Read this story by a writer named K.B. Carle!

Just popping in to share this a story I came across on Twitter today by a writer named K.B. Carle. The story is called "Vagabond Mannequin" and it's really fun and original. It appeared today at Christopher James's Jellyfish Review.

READ "Vagabond Mannequin by K.B. Carle @ Jellyfish Review

I have the flu and I'm trying to write anyways.

Hey kind readers. Hope all is well with you all. I have the flu and like a dummy I didn't start taking some medicine until yesterday. This is making writing harder than usual, which is to say nigh impossible.

But I'm trucking right along. Today is Proof Day, or day one of Proof Day. I'm giving a final pass to an edited draft of Dysphoria. Adam Van Winkle of Cowboy Jamboree Press has worked hard to get this edited draft into my hands and I'm trying to do right by him in return. It's all for the better of the novel. It's all about getting another story out there in t he world. Man, what a noble goal, right? Yes indeed.

I've stopped first draft work on The Orchard Is Full of Sound for the time being. But I'm close there, too. I've only got three more sections to finish and that book will be initially ready for the Sept. 1 deadline. Of course I'll tinker with it and add and delete and rewrite daily until that date. It's just how I write books. Always tinkering and twisting and refitting until the very end.

What do I plan on doing once these two contracted books are finished or near-finished? Well then I've bought myself time to write short stories. My break from writing is writing, no lie. I really think that after writing everyday for the past 30 years that I just write everyday now; it's just something I do. It might not always be good sentences, but I'm in there swinging.

Ten years ago this October I started writing here at Bent Country. The lit community was a different scene back then, but much the same, too. Writers supporting each other, etc. Some of my frequent readers are still friends, but the energy has went a little, or something. I'm not sure. I'm still in very infrequent contact with many of these folks - xTx, Mel Bosworth, Roxane Gay, and Marcus Speh, for instance. But there are others who only existed in that magical two or three year period such as Dave Erlwine, Cami Park (rest her soul), and Chris Okum, to name a few. What am I trying to say? I don't know, really. Things are different; it seems like all of us either wrote our books and had them published and then sort of went quiet or we are still in there sending out stories and writing books and just babbling all hours of the day. I'm of the latter group, and I'm not sure if it's the best group to be in. I just no I'm always going to write, so why not share it with people if I can.

So I'm off to proof some more and probably jot a little on a story or two today. I'm got one story in the oven right now I'm really excited about, but I can't remember what I've titled it. Strange. Maybe ten years doesn't just take a toll on creative energy.

A post about things and then, of a sudden, a small story about a worm.

So I want to write but I'm wrote out on all my ongoing books or stories. I mean I have written hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of words day after day after day for many weeks. The Orchard Is Full of Sound, short story 1 Dyphoria, short story 2, short story 3, Absolute Invention, short story 4. Back and forth. And back and forth until I don't know if I'm coming or going.

But I must write.

So here I am.

I have a lot of news that's come my way in the past week or so, but I'm not sure how much of it I can really share right now. I know there's one thing I can't share yet. That's fine. The other I probably can but I'm going to keep it under my hat until I see some buzz out there I didn't generate. Wow, with vagueness like this I should be posting on Facebook.

But let's just say there's been good news and I'll share it as soon as I can. I will say that I'm closing in on a completed first draft of The Orchard Is Full of Sound. I've no doubt the good folks at WVU Press will have many good ideas to share with me on the book and that it will come away from that a much better book. I'm actually looking forward to that.

I read something about there not being any worms around anymore. I think they're around as they ever have been, we just stopped turning over logs and rocks and so forth.

It made me want to imagine something about a worm...

Once there was a worm. He was the last worm on earth, but didn't know this. He didn't know enough to be lonely, but he was lonely all the same. During the day he stayed beneath a flat, gray stone. No one knows what he did under the stone. Each daybreak he came out into the sun. But not for long, because he would dry out and die. What he longed for more than anything was to find a companion. Even in his short life loneliness grew heavier by the seconds. There were no others, though, and he became sad, beyond sad. So one daybreak he came from beneath the flat, gray stone and never returned.

Five brief examples in support of evidence that William T. Vollmann is a better writer than you and me and that is okay.

So I'm still working through Vollmann's The Atlas and here are some examples of amazing moments when this guy is on magic writing dust he may have stolen from the tomb of William Shakespeare.


Example 1:

"In this town, we answer a question only by I don’t know and probably."

Example 2:

"...behind which occasional lights burned weakly like failures."

Example 3:

"...but the hair of the one he danced with was as flowery ricefields under hot purple clouds."

Example 4:

"...whose trees spread lushly pubic shadows..."

Example 5: 

"Since Heaven and forever are both beyond time, whoever is meant to be in Heaven must already be in Heaven now."

In which I gush some more about William T. Vollmann.

This is one of those posts I sometimes write because I start getting the feeling that Bent Country has converted back to its original form—a mostly unfurnished room where the sound of my own voice becomes more interesting than usual.

I'm reading William T. Vollmann again, which is always dangerous. He writes so fluidly and so well, like a water hose of perfectly combined words that is stuck and sort of spraying all over the yard of literature. Not to mention if you look up the prolific in the dictionary there's an awesome picture of William T. Vollmann with an amazing bowl haircut.

The book of his I'm reading is called The Atlas. I saw somewhere about a month back that someone cited it as their favorite book. A writer, which, let's be honest, carries far more weight than, well, more average readers, for lack of a better term.

It is for sure all it's cracked up to be, though. Vollmann can stop a reader in their tracks about as good as anybody working. Browse THE ATLAS at Goodreads.

The People in the Trees is my favorite book so far this year. It'll take a lot to knock it down.

Just finished reading The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara and so far it's my favorite read of this year. I'm only eight books deep at this point, but I feel like this one's going to be hard to beat.

Last year my favorite was The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson and I read 42 more books after that one with none topping DJ's magnificent farewell collection.

I've seen reviews saying The People in the Trees is difficult to read because of the depictions of child sexual abuse, but don't buy into that. There are certainly difficult scenes but everything feeds the narrative. In other words, there's nothing that's disturbing for the sake of being disturbing. Besides, the central theme of the book - immortality and the discovery of immortality - will keep most readers pretty focused.

"Her Eulogy, Etc." is a beautiful homeless story of mine that found a beautiful home @ Vending Machine Press

Mike Lafontaine published a story of mine called "Her Eulogy, Etc." at Vending Machine Press this weekend. Mike has always supported my writing at VMP, and I'm so grateful he liked this story. So many other places turned it down...dozens and dozens, acutally.

Here's how the story starts:

“She saw the ghost of the old slave when she was sixteen. Ephemeral, a mustard-colored fog in his form. She figured him a ghost. There was no way knowing for sure that wasn’t wicked, like Tracy’s magic or taking up a ouija. She never considered the bourbon she drank or how she’d never see daylight again.”

- from an Appalachian folktale, as told by Sister Hall

I hope you go read this story. It's one I'm proud of and Mike liked enough to publish. In the indie lit, it's the most generous thing one can do for another.

Again, here's a link to the story — HER EULOGY, ETC.

So I'm Reading The Overstory by Richard Powers

Two nice quotes from the book and why they resonate with me:

"A woman in the coda of life, raising her eyes and lifting her hands in that moment just before fear turns into knowledge."

This one made me think of my heart attack. When they told me I was having a heart attack, I so distinctly remember the original and entirely unique fear that ran over me. A fear I had never experienced before, and I've had my share. I flatlined but was shocked back to life or I would have reached that point when the fear would have been turned into knowledge, entry into the largest mystery of all time. What's on the other side.


"We don’t want to kill the golden goose, but it’s the only way around here to get to the eggs."

This one drops me directly into my homeplace of Eastern Kentucky. I could be peeling potatoes in Belgium, read this, and be at once back at home. Home, a place where me and mine have no choice but to do what has to be done to survive. If that process, for instance, lands us with a credit score in the 400s, then that's the price that has to be paid for day-to-day existence. We don't have the luxury of working on something as abstract as a credit score. We have to get the eggs.

New World Writing publishes my short story "Almost Alone in Dark Valleys"

I'm thankful to have new work published yesterday at New World Writing. This is the fourth story of mine they have put out into the world, for which I owe editor Kim Chinquee and founding editor Rick Barthelme a huge, huge thanks.

The story is called "Almost Alone in Dark Valleys" and it's one I'm particularly proud of, which is something I don't always have the courage to say about my work. I hope you'll read it and let me know what you think.

READ "Almost Alone in Dark Valleys"

My story "Go Get Your Honor" republished at Defuncted: A Collection of Abandoned Things

It's a good day, you all. A story of mine, "Go Get Your Honor", originally published at the long gone Emprise Review, was republished yesterday at new journal called Defuncted.

Defuncted was started by Roo Black and Brenda Birenbaum and gives good homes to stories once available online from journals that have since shuttered. It's a beautiful idea.

"Go Get Your Honor" is one of the stories I'm most proud of, certainly the story I'm most happy with that appeared in my first short story collection The Same Terrible Storm. It was also the first story of mine to be nominated for a Pushcart Prize, thanks to then editor Roxane Gay.

So please do head over to Defuncted and read "Go Get Your Honor". There'll be a lot of other reincarnated stories to have a look at too. Enjoy.

So much good happening: Updates on the Pancake book, Dysphoria, short stories with X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine and New World Writing, and an upcoming reading at Taylor Books

For the past month or so I've been riding this nice wave of book-related good news. The Pancake book coming out with West Virginia University Press and my Appalachian gothic novel Dysphoria due out this coming spring. An excerpt from that novel was published yesterday at Cowboy Jamboree Magazine. I do hope you link to it and give it a read. I'll also be reading some of my work and then discussing the Pancake book at Taylor Books in Charleston, West Virginia tonight at 7 p.m. thanks to my amazing friend Jay Hill. Jay also worked us up a website for featuring news related to the upcoming Pancake book and other news related to my writing. He's a jewel, you all. Here's a link to that website, which, by the way, and awesomely, can be found at the url breecepancake.com.

But, in addition to this, I want to share some good short story news.

On January 15 my short story "A Shadow the Length of a Lifetime" appeared at X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, a publication that has quickly became one of my absolute favorites. This will be the second short story of mine they've published. The first was a story called "Victory Party" that appeared this past July. Editors Jennifer Greidus and Chris Dankland have built a stunning collection of fiction, nonfiction, interviews, and reviews. I really would love if you visited and spent some time reading the work there.

Not long after finalizing things for the upcoming publication of "A Shadow the Length of a Lifetime" I heard back from one of my other top three favorite journals, New World Writing. The fantastic writer Kim Chinquee, who is the senior editor at NWW, accepted my short story "Almost Alone in Dark Valleys" last week, making it the fourth short story of mine to appear there, dating back to its days as Mississippi Review Online and, after that, BLIP, before becoming New World Writing. Regardless the journals name, you should never overlook NWW when searching out the best short fiction available today.

I'm telling you all this kind of post always just feels like bragging to me, but I'll be rather damned before I don't share these kinds of wonderful news.

Adam Johnson on the second person point of view

"The second person is out there at the end of the periodic table of point of view. It is mercurial, a complicated thing. Maddening when not used well. It is difficult because the second person personal is singular and plural, hence the need for 'ya’ll.' We also use it to form the imperative. A properly used second person can seem like you are being commanded to do something as a reader; people love that. What I think is the most interesting about the second person is that it is the pronoun with which most persons refer to themselves inside their own mind. It is something you would never let out. So while as the first person is an externalized, orchestrated voice with an inherent sense of audience to it, the second person is very personal, private, an unsentimental voice with which we speak only to ourselves."

- Adam Johnson in an interview with The Rumpus, 2015

Half & Half

During the Spanish Flu Epidemic in Eureka, Utah a woman lost five of her six children and her husband. She would no sooner return home from the cemetery only to find that another child had died. This happened to her and no one remembers her name.

—

There is still no explanation as to how cattle are being found drained of all blood and with organs removed with surgical precision but with no signs of hemorrhage and no trace of blood on the ground around them or anywhere on their bodies. The first written account of this kind of event was in 1606.

—

For the past four or five months I've felt like I have one foot in this world and one foot in the next. I somehow survived a massive heart attack five years ago and still can't quit smoking and am only gaining weight due to lack of exercise and terrible eating habits. These facts add up to another fact: At forty-two the chances of seeing my fifties are not at all good. I've been trying to live with this knowledge while being unable to change my life to avoid it. It is what it is.

—

The late, great Thom Jones said: “You know, they call it earth, but actually it’s hell. Even a good day is so full of horrors it’s almost unbearable. When I open my eyes, there’s a chasm of despair waiting for me.”

SLC