Lindsay Champion

The Only One

2011-12-29T10:10:00.000-05:00

"You're the only one who knows when you're using things to protect yourself and keep your ego together and when you're opening and letting things fall apart, letting the world come as it is - working with it rather than struggling against it. You're the only one who knows." - Pema Chodron

What'll I Do

2011-11-14T19:24:00.005-05:00

Passenger by Lisa Hannigan is my best friend right now.

Boundary Poles

2011-11-13T10:43:00.002-05:00

From The New Yorker:

"If there were a sole, reliable route to successful fiction, I’d be very keen to know about it. For me, finished drafts emerge from anxious obedience to a bunch of (often) contradictory commandments: the story should be deeply felt, yet shouldn’t hold 'feelings' dear. There should be pleasure in the language alone, yet not so much indulgent glee in the sentence work that it robs the characters of their oxygen. The story ought to make the reader laugh, yet if it tap-dances for yuks you’re lost. Etc., etc. With luck, after worriedly tacking to and fro between these sorts of boundary poles, plus a bunch of others, I arrive at work that works." - Wells Tower

The Weird Hippy Soap That Saved My Skin (But Not My Soul, Sorry)

2011-11-12T19:11:00.014-05:00

One part soap, one part kooky religious sermon

I've had red, bumpy, oily-and-dry-at-the-same-time (how does that even happen?) problem skin for as long as I can remember. Magically, miraculously, the only time my skin looked halfway decent was in high school. I'm not sure how that happened, but whoever was responsible for that, I'm eternally grateful. But for the rest of my life, my skin has been a big mess, and I've tried almost everything to clear things up. Prescription creams, Clean and Clear, Neutrogena, the really expensive stuff, the really cheap stuff (Stridex pads?), and nothing, nothing, nothing helped. After a two-month battle with The Devil's Potion, aka. Clinique Acne Solutions, I decided I just wasn't meant to have clear skin, and started investing in tubs of Bare Minerals foundation instead.

That is, until I stayed at my dad's house a few weeks ago. The only soap he had in his shower was Dr. Bronner's, which I've always dismissed as some weird, hippy soap that probably doesn't work. Sure, I've used it before, but its weird herby smell and label full of weird religious phrases always put me off. When you're trying to take a shower, the last thing you want staring you back in the face is: "Eternal Father, Eternal One! Exceptions eternally? Absolute none!" But, since it was my only option, I grudgingly lathered up. And after about a week of using it regularly, the craziest thing happened. My skin cleared up! What?!? I kept waiting for a zit to pop up. Every morning, I'd wake up and rush to the mirror, ready to shout, "Ah-ha! I knew it!" But I've been using Dr. Bronner's twice a day for the past few weeks, and my skin has never looked better. It's like I have a completely new face. And not a creepy, new face like Tom Cruise gets in Vanilla Sky.

I can't believe it took me so long to find out that I was in a cycle of abuse with my acne medications. I'd use one, and the next day, I'd break out. Then the medication would say, "Oh, baby, I'm so sorry, baby, I'll never do it again. I love you so much. I'll make it up to you." And then I'd use it again and next time, the breakout would be even worse. I've been using some type of acne wash since I was in middle school, so let's say I spent $20 on acne products every month since 6th grade. It means I've wasted over $3,000 on chemicals that did nothing but make my skin break out. I know I sound like a Dr. Bronner's infomercial (I'd really like to see one of those), but for one easy payment of $9, I get a huge tub that could last me the entire year. So, if you're not fully happy with your skin, switch to Dr. Bronner's (or any castile soap -- they contain no harsh chemicals or foaming agents) for a few weeks and see how it goes. If it doesn't work, let me know. I have a bunch of half-used bottles of Clinique Acne Solutions I need to get rid of.

A Very Punchdrunk Halloween

2011-10-24T19:24:00.019-04:00

One thing that really scares me is the weird party scene in Eyes Wide Shut where everyone is naked and wearing masks. I think it was mostly created to scare the crap out of me, as most Stanley Kubrick movies are. He and David Lynch really know how to push my oh-my-god-that's-the-creepiest-thing-I've-ever-seen-I'm-going-to-have-nightmares-about-this-forever buttons. But here's the scariest part: I have reason to believe the weird naked mask-wearing party scene in Eyes Wide Shut is based on actual parties that happen in Los Angeles. Bryan Callen told a story on the Risk Podcast that talks about the real-life existence of these creepy masked get-togethers, and ever since, I've had nightmares about wandering through a weird house where everyone is wearing masks and lounging around on Victorian furniture. Thanks a lot, Kubrick.

My friend, musician and wardrobe goddess Laura Bowman, called me up last week and offered me tickets to the new show she's working on. "It's called Sleep No More. All you have to do is put on a mask and wander around a weird, creepy warehouse while watching an interpretive dance version of Macbeth," she says. "Oh, and yes, the cast does get naked." Well, since I've been on this Do Stuff That Scares Me kick and Sleep No More is clearly my nightmare-come-true, I knew I had to go.

Sleep No More was created by the British theater company Punchdrunk, who are making some changes in the way New Yorkers think about theater. The role of an audience member hasn't changed much since 550 B.C., when the Greeks created the basic concept of proscenium seating (a bunch of chairs facing a stage, giving the audience a window-like view of the action) and performed the "We'll do something and you'll sit here and watch this" type of theater most of us are used to. Punchdrunk is offering something new – well, sort of. Wikipedia calls Punchdrunk's technique "an 'immersive' presentation in which the audience is free to choose what to watch and where to go." Basically, there's no set beginning, middle and end to this play, and whatever you happen to see is what you get.

Although it's definitely the first time I've ever seen anything like this in New York, this choose-your-own-adventure style of theater isn't entirely innovative. Maria Irene Fornes used a similar immersive concept in her 1977 play Fefu and Her Friends. In Fefu, audience members are split into groups. Each group views a different scene at a different time (which is also pretty similar to the old [and also creepy] Disney ride, The Carousel of Progress). Eventually, the characters all cross paths, bringing the cast and audience together into one location for a final, climactic endgame. Sleep No More is a similar deal – audience members are split into groups and invited to wander through the set at their leisure to discover the scenes in whatever order they wish. But because the whole audience is wearing identical white masks and exploring five darkened floors full of rusty hospital beds, desk drawers overflowing with pieces of hair and a broken crib with hundreds of headless baby dolls hovering above it, the whole thing kind of blew my mind.

Because I'm sure I would've peed my pants or had a heart attack, I'm very thankful I didn't have a one-on-one encounter with any of the actors. Before I went to the show, I read a bunch of Yelp reviews to see what I was getting into, and apparently one guy was led by an actor into a creepy secret bathroom with a running shower. The actor instructs (silently – did I mention there is no talking allowed?) the guy to sit in a small bathroom stall. The actor locks the door, leaves the room and turns off the lights. Just when the guy is getting really scared, the lights come back on and the actor is in the stall with the guy, sitting right there next to him! AHHHH!!! Although I definitely didn't get an experience like that, I did get to see some absolutely beautiful dance sequences that defy gravity without the use of any hydraulics (got that, Wicked?) In my favorite scene, a male character (I have no idea what Macbeth character he was supposed to be) flipped around like a gymnast in an alcove full of old water pipes and suitcases. Did I have any idea what was going on? No, and I know Macbeth pretty well. But the stage pictures that Sleep No More creates are so stirring, the plot becomes secondary. And surprisingly, I was fine with that.

If you're looking for a play full of characters with heart and a tearful curtain call, Sleep No More is definitely not your thing. You're going to walk out saying, "Yes, but what was it about? The guy covered in blood was who?" But if you're looking for a rad place to spend Halloween week... Well, it's sold out until the end of the year. But if you're: A.) braver than me, and B.) happen to have an old trilby hat laying around, you might want to sign up to be in the play, because Sleep No More is looking for extras to "create special Halloween week events." And I bet that cast and crew really know how to throw a Halloween after party.

Awkward Dog

2011-10-14T21:34:00.014-04:00

(This is NOT what I looked like.)

And in this next installation of things that scare me... Yoga. Yep, even relaxation techniques freak me out. For years, I've been fascinated with the idea of yoga, but too nervous to take a class in front of actual yoga-ers watching me. And WAY too nervous to have a teacher pointing out my bad form. My fear was that the judgmental teacher and amazing twisty-like-a-pretzel students would ruin my experience, making me hate yoga forever.

But here's the silliest part about it. I secretly love yoga, even though I've never really tried it. I own a whole laundry load of yoga pants, a barely-used turquoise yoga mat, and a queue full of yoga videos on Netflix. If you're a scaredy cat like me who wants to try yoga in the comfort of your own home without the embarrassment of doing it in front of a bunch of people, I highly recommend the Crunch Candlelight Yoga video. Although most of my yoga experience has been by the light of the glowing TV screen and not any actual candles, I also took a few basic yoga classes in college. TV and college yoga made me feel happy and relaxed, but still not confident enough to hold my own in a real class.

Last week, I'm proud to say that I took my very first yoga class – with people! I grabbed my fear by the hand and dragged it, thrashing and cursing and punching things, into the yoga studio with me. I'd love to say my first yoga class was a nurturing, kind and painless experience, but it wasn't. But that's the best part of the whole thing, I think. Even though my first class was awkward and painful and weird, it's perfectly okay! Sure, there's a couple of things I wish I knew before I got there – I should have brought a towel and a bottle of water. I should have taken a super-beginner's class instead of one that had a variety of twisty-pretzel skill levels. Because, let's be honest, I was quite obviously the worst one in the class. Downward dog, the most basic yoga position of all time, made my arms and legs rattle and my back cramp up. But when the class was over, I left feeling relaxed, light and free – probably because I left all of that fear on the studio floor. And all of that sweat.

Things That Scare Me

2011-09-29T23:56:00.000-04:00

I've started this project where I do something every day that I find terrifying. I probably won't be going bungee jumping or riding a motorcycle off a cliff or anything -- I'm a huge fraidy cat. A lot of things that you normal people have done a thousand times, like riding a horse or doing a somersault underwater, are things I've never had the guts to try. I've never broken a bone. I hold onto the banister every time I go down the stairs, because you never know what could happen. I've skinned my knee exactly one time, when I was 7. And it only bled for about 5 seconds. So although I'd love to announce I'm taking up cliff diving tomorrow, I think I have a long way to go.

When I mean "terrifying," I'm talking about the clenched-up feeling I get in my stomach when I think of a good idea. Instead of patting myself on the back for coming up with a good idea and going with it, my first instinct is to judge myself. Why would you want to do something crazy like that when the stuff you're doing now is so predictable and safe? Why would you want to mess with something that's fine as it is? I've come to the realization that safety is a made-up thing that humans use to make ourselves feel grounded. Sure, the odds of hurting yourself are higher when you're doing something stupid, but there's really no way to know what's going to happen, ever, at any moment. Doing the safe thing is an agreement: I will remain perennially unsatisfied, but it's what I'm used to, so I'll take it.

The first terrifying thing I'm doing is writing this blog post. I don't like to write about myself because it makes me feel vulnerable. Who is reading this? Who is looking at this and judging me right now for writing something all serious and introspective and wordy? Well, I don't care anymore. It's scary and I'm doing it!

I'm also opening this blog back up to comments. I'd love to know what types of silly things scare other people so I don't feel like such a baby!

Book Review: 703 by Nancy Makin

2011-09-06T18:40:00.000-04:00

From Bibliobuffet:

Weight-loss shows are the new reality TV fad, and I have to admit, they intrigue me. The formula for most of these shows is the same: A personal trainer surprises an overweight person, puts him on a strict diet and an eight-hour-a-day exercise program, and poof! Magically, the weight melts off and the now-skinny person shows his new body off for his family and friends. Overweight viewers may be tempted to buy the trainer’s workout videos or the New York Times bestseller, The Biggest Loser Cookbook in an attempt to mimic these fantastic results at home. But memoir writer Nancy Makin argues that strict diet and exercise plans are not the answer, and they do not address the underlying emotional reasons why overweight people overeat. And Makin should know—she lost 530 pounds without any diet or exercise program whatsoever.

Makin’s debut memoir, 703: How I Lost More Than a Quarter Ton and Gained a Life is not a literary version of reality TV shows like The Biggest Loser and Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edition. Instead, Makin delves into her life story, which happens to include a fourteen-year period where she never left her apartment and, at her heaviest, weighed 703 pounds. The memoir is a chronological telling of her life, from early childhood to her early fifties, and the story of how she finally realized the missing piece in her life was not food, but an unfaltering sense of self worth. (more)

Book Review: Sheepish by Catherine Friend

2011-08-10T11:26:00.000-04:00

From Bibliobuffet:

Farms aren’t my thing, but I really wish they were. To quote my favorite chick flick, Titanic, I’ve always been “more of an indoor girl.” I’ve spent my adult life as a city dweller, and for the last eight years, I’ve been completely backyard-less. So the idea of having acres and acres of fresh vegetables, flowers and livestock to call my own is appealing, even though I don’t know the first thing about owning a farm. This week, I got my farming education from Sheepish: Two Women, Fifty Sheep & Enough Wool to Save the Planet, a warm and fuzzy memoir by author and farmer, Catherine Friend.

Friend never had aspirations of owning a farm. But when her partner Melissa reveals her dream of becoming a farmer, Friend agrees to give farm life a shot. Melissa takes charge of the fifty sheep and a handful of steers, llamas, and ducks on their farm in Minnesota, while Friend is content to remain the Backup Farmer. But as Sheepish proves, even Backup Farmers have bags and bags of wooly wisdom to share.

Friend has written two other farm-related memoirs, so Sheepish focuses mostly on the sheep, and “the middles”—the fifteen-year mark of her farming career, as well as the middle of her relationship with Melissa. “We rarely pay attention to middles,” Friend writes. “Perhaps we ignore them because they’re problematic. The middles of our beds often sag. The middles of our bodies sag. The middle of a long story told by your brother-in-law is likely to sag, and so you’ll need another beer to stay focused. Everyone needs a reason to keep going when they’re in the middle.” (more)

Book Review: My Boyfriend Wrote a Book About Me by Hilary Winston

2011-07-01T18:32:00.002-04:00

From Bibliobuffet.com:

Reading a memoir is like hearing one side of an argument—the author always gets the last word. Although I’ll sometimes read in the news that an errant third cousin or grandmother has sued a memoir writer for defamation, readers are rarely given the gift of two separate books about the same relationship. In the hilariously heartbreaking memoir My Boyfriend Wrote a Book About Me: And Other Stories I Shouldn’t Share With Acquaintances, Coworkers, Taxi Drivers, Assistants, Job Interviewers, Bikini Waxers, and Ex/Current/Future Boyfriends but Have, Hilary Winston writes a literary rebuttal to her ex-boyfriend Chad Kultgen’s slanderous novel, The Average American Male.

Winston, a sitcom writer who has worked for Community and My Name is Earl, dated Kultgen, who she calls “Kyle” in her book, for five years. After a slightly rocky breakup, Kultgen published his first novel, The Average American Male, in 2007. Winston insists that the protagonist’s girlfriend Casey is not only based on her, but that the book contains nearly word-for-word conversations that she and Kultgen had throughout their relationship. Of course, none of this would be so bad if Kultgen’s novel didn’t constantly refer to Casey as “the fat-assed girlfriend.” It’s every ex-girlfriend’s worst nightmare. (more)

Essay: Two Years of Memoirs

2011-07-01T18:24:00.001-04:00

From Bibliobuffet.com:

When I first started writing this column in June of 2009, I was a memoir novice. I had recently gotten on an essay-reading kick, and I couldn’t get enough of short-form memoir greats like the Davids: David Rakoff and David Sedaris. I loved how I felt a connection to these authors, the same way I felt a bond with my favorite fictional characters. I think of David Sedaris’s entire family—his parents Lou and Sharon, his wacky sister Amy and his artistic little sister Gretchen—as my own dysfunctional second cousins. In my early memoir-reading days, I bought the books that were featured in the store window at Barnes & Noble, but I was too busy reading fiction to give the less notable memoirs a try. Enter Bibliobuffet. Starting this column gave me a great excuse to dive into lesser-known memoirs from first-time authors and small publishing houses. Two years ago, I had no idea how much memoirs would teach me about reading, writing, and reviewing.

Before I wrote my first review, I set some parameters for the column based on my own personal preferences. Tackling the entire memoir genre felt too daunting. There are so many wonderful new memoirs released every month, and I wanted to focus specifically on these modern stories. A new wave of memoirists have become wildly popular over the past few years, with trailblazers like Sedaris paving the way. Because I had initially fallen in love with essayists like Rakoff and Sedaris from their appearances on This American Life, I was already familiar with a small pool of these modern memoir writers—but I couldn’t wait to read and review my new finds. (more)

Book Review: Found by Jennifer Lauck

2011-07-01T18:19:00.003-04:00

From Bibliobuffet.com:

In America, adoption is widely regarded as a positive experience. A child who is unable to stay with her parents is adopted by a family who can care for her, and everyone’s happy. Right? But although many adoptions provide safe and loving homes for parentless children in the United States, not every story ends so happily. According to memoirist Jennifer Lauck, adoptive families are unable to recreate the psychological bond that exists between a birth mother and her child. And Lauck, the author of Found: A Memoir, should know—she was adopted not once, but twice. In Found, Lauck goes on a search for her birth family and discovers herself in the process.

Besides Found, Lauck is the author of a slew of other memoirs about her life, including the New York Times bestseller, Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found. But readers who haven’t read any of Lauck’s prior work won’t feel out of the loop while reading Found. The first half of the book catches the reader up to speed: Lauck’s birth mother was still in high school when she got pregnant. Because unwed, teenage mothers were a big no-no in 1963 in Reno, Nevada, Lauck was whisked away immediately after her birth and adopted by the delivery room doctor’s accountant. “Dr. Smernoff pulled strings to get Bud and Janet off a three-year adoption waiting list,” Lauck writes. “He didn’t mention Janet’s medical problems, which included a recent surgery to remove an eleven-inch tumor from her spine . . . He didn’t talk about Bud’s financial ruin, due to Janet’s medical bills.” (more)

Book Review: Arms Wide Open by Patricia Harman

2011-07-01T18:17:00.001-04:00

From Bibliobuffet.com:

I try to approach each new book I read with a clear, open mind. I don’t want any preconceived notions to cloud my reading experience. I do not read any published reviews of the book before writing my own, and this helps me stay focused on my own interpretation of the work. On weekend mornings, I’m frequently seen running around the house with my hands over my ears, rushing to the radio to turn off NPR before a book I’m reading is about to be reviewed. Usually, this “hear no evil” approach gives me a fresh take on the memoir, and I’m able to focus entirely on my own opinion of the story. But this week, I learned that there’s a fine line between turning a blind eye to reviews, and reading a book with blinders on. For some books, prior research of the author and her body of work is imperative—otherwise, I’ll find myself lost in the woods.
Such is the case with Patricia Harman’s memoir, Arms Wide Open: A Midwife’s Journey. Harman’s writing style is enchanting, and I fell in love with her narration instantly. When the book begins, Harman is a seventies-era, nature-loving hippie who lives with her young son on a commune in West Virginia with no plumbing or electricity. And although it was her dream to live off the land, she feels unsatisfied. She longs for something to give her life meaning, and finds solace in teaching child-birthing classes to her friends and fellow commune dwellers. Ah-ha, I thought. Now she’ll decide to become a midwife. I assumed this would be the story of a woman who became a midwife—hence the subtitle, “a midwife’s journey.” I read about Harman’s feeling of dissatisfaction at the commune, tales of assisting the deliveries of her friends’ and neighbors’ children, and her decision to go to school to become a nurse-midwife. But I was never given the satisfaction of seeing Harman actually succeed as a working midwife. Instead, Arms Wide Open stops short, and then leaps ahead in time nearly forty years, to 2008. (more)

Book Review: Townie by Andre Dubus III

2011-05-26T00:46:00.002-04:00

From Bibliobuffet.com:

Before I start reading a new memoir, I usually have to skim through a short disclaimer, lodged awkwardly between the title page and the dedication. I have a suspicion that these disclaimers began popping up after James Frey’s controversial and possibly untrue memoir, A Million Little Pieces, was slammed by Oprah Winfrey. “Some characters are actually composites of a few people,” these disclaimers generally read. “The order of some events may have been changed.” As far as the reader is concerned, it’s still a memoir. But if you’re a lawyer, the book could be fiction—there’s a disclaimer, isn’t there? Although these cautionary passages are present in most of the memoirs I read, they always bug me. If an author thinks that what he has written is the truth, and he wants to emboss the word “memoir” in gold ink on the front of his book, that’s enough information for me. As far as I’m concerned, using the word “memoir” means that we have an agreement: In the author’s eyes, this is his story. Whether it holds up in court is none of my business.

When I flipped through the copyright and title pages of Townie by Andres Dubus III, I was thrilled to see that it lacked a disclaimer of any kind. Although I regret that I’ve never read House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, or any other of Dubus’s respected and award-winning novels, I immediately trusted him. His memoir didn’t begin with an excuse, an explanation or a witty definition of what “truth” means to him. In fact, as I began to read, I realized that Dubus didn’t seem to care whether anyone was reading his book at all. Townie is the deeply personal exploration of one man’s violence, told not with rage, but with disarming vulnerability and wisdom. Dubus seems to tell this story not to sell books or gain notoriety, but to save his own troubled life. (more)

Book Review: Hotel Kid by Stephen Lewis

2011-05-09T22:19:00.001-04:00

From Bibliobuffet:

A medium-sized hotel sits on the corner of 51st Street and 7th Avenue in midtown Manhattan. In any other city, it might be considered a large hotel, but in its location just south of Times Square, gleaming steel skyscrapers dwarf it. I know I’ve passed by the Michelangelo Hotel thousands of times on my way to work, although I never could have told you the name of it. To me, it’s just another hotel I could never afford to stay in. But to Stephen Lewis in his debut memoir, Hotel Kid, it’s home.

In 1931, the Michelangelo is known as the Taft Hotel, and Stephen Lewis and his parents are permanent residents in a four-room suite on the 15th floor. Lewis’s father is the general manager of the hotel, which means he is very, very important—especially in the eyes of Stephen and his younger brother, Peter. Having a hotel manager for a father means free ice cream, fast elevator rides and room service on small rolling carts every single night. “My earliest recollection is of Peter eating in his high chair while I sat at a room service table in our bedroom,” writes Lewis. “Probably a sous-chef had pureed meat or vegetables for him. . . . It arrived on a table pushed by Harry the Waiter, who’d play with us for a few minutes before he lifted the snowy napkins off our sandwiches.” (more)

Book Review: Happy by Alex Lemon

2011-04-11T13:15:00.001-04:00

From Bibliobuffet:

When I read a great memoir, it takes over. And for a few days, everything looks different. I begin to see my life through the lens of the book, as if the author has hijacked my senses. Not every memoir changes my awareness this way, but it’s worth reading a whole pile of books to find the rare one that does. This week, I thrashed around inside Alex Lemon’s mind while he suffered a brain hemorrhage in his debut memoir, Happy. And like Lemon, I was taken on a hallucinatory ride that left me feeling wired, debilitated and temporarily insane.

In his freshman year of college, Alex Lemon’s life is all planned out. He’s the star catcher on the school baseball team and he’s used to being the best. Lemon’s friends call him “Happy,” because he’s always ready to party, smoke a bowl, or throw a few shots back with his buddies from the team. When Lemon crashes into a wall or face plants into the grass, his friends laugh and blame it on his drinking. But Lemon knows something is wrong. “The world whirls when I crack open,” he writes. “Bookshelf, poster board, the windows wink their eyes. The digital clock is a red blur. Every light pulses yelloworange [sic] and brilliant, and the TV is a blue splash.” On the outside, Lemon is the drunk college baseball player, but on the inside, he’s panicking. He has constant vertigo, his eyes twitch back and forth and he’s unable to hit a baseball. “I go hours without being able to feel my body,” he writes. “Confused, trying to figure out what’s happening around me. Inside me.” (more)

Book Review: Confessions of a Rebel Debutante by Anna Fields

2011-04-01T14:08:00.003-04:00

From Bibliobuffet:

I’m a northeasterner, born and bred. I was raised in Massachusetts, and my entire extended family hails from either from Connecticut or New York. But although my upbringing was different than Anna Fields’s grits-and-ambrosia-eating North Carolina childhood, I was willing to give her new memoir, Confessions of a Rebel Debutante, a shot. In a world of debutantes, Fields grew up as a Mr. Wizard-loving geek who loved to sing at her school’s talent show. As a show tunes-loving outcast, I hoped I’d have something in common with Fields after all. Confessions of a Rebel Debutante tells readers what it takes to be a debutante—and the story of why Anna Fields didn’t make the cut.

Whenever Fields is at a party, her friends ask her about the South. “They envision ‘the South’ as one of two stereotypes: either Gone With the Wind or Jerry Springer,” she writes. The truth, she believes, is somewhere in between the two. And even though Fields belongs to the prestigious Wellingham Academy, the oldest boarding school for girls in the Southeast, she doesn’t fit into the poufy-dress wearing mold that her fellow Southern belles do. She’d rather run around in overalls covered with catfish guts. (more)

Book Review: Orangutan by Colin Broderick

2011-03-11T16:03:00.001-05:00

From Bibliobuffet:

I’ve never seen a photo of someone frowning on Facebook. In Facebook Land, no one ever loses his job, wakes up hungover, or feels lonely. Even in the real world, we’re encouraged to tack on a phony smile and keep anything sad or troublesome to ourselves. It takes a brave author to own up to his failures and write them all down, chronologically, in a 300-page jumble for the entire world to read. And although he barely lived to tell his story, Colin Broderick’s debut memoir Orangutan reminds his readers that everyone makes mistakes. Lots of them.

Broderick’s story begins in a new city—New York. At twenty-one, he moved out of County Tyrone to “escape the caged feeling of living as a Catholic in the British-occupied North of Ireland.” On the morning after his arrival, he wakes up drunk and not sure where he is or how he got there. Broderick and thirteen other Irish immigrants peel themselves up off the floor to go to work. Broderick’s cousin owns a floor sanding business and in one day, the author makes more money than he’d make in a month back home. After hours of backbreaking labor, Broderick and his crew head to a local bar for drinks. And even though he’s still wearing the same clothes he wore when he left Ireland, the author can’t turn down a drink with his new friends. (more)

Book Review: On Writing by Stephen King

2011-03-03T15:11:00.000-05:00

From Bibliobuffet:

In The Outliers, Malcom Gladwell theorizes that practicing anything for over 10,000 hours will yield success. Judging by Stephen King’s ridged work schedule and volumes of successful novels, I’d say he reached his 10,000 hours sometime in the early ‘70s. Although horror novels aren’t my style, I couldn’t resist a peek at King’s blueprint for success. As an aspiring novelist, I am fascinated by the work routine of other writers. Do they write at a desk, on the front porch, in bed? And since there’s no Inside the Actors Studio for writers, a memoir is the closest we book-lovers will get to an inside look at King’s process. In his book, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, King examines his life as a writer and uses his experiences as a teaching tool for young writers.

But On Writing isn’t your traditional creative writing textbook. King’s book is a dual-layered educational memoir, complete with homework assignments and examples from other texts. The author guides would-be authors through the process of writing a novel, starting with the incubation of that first, small idea. If you get stuck on the plot, King recommends switching the sexes of the two leads. Turn the cheating husband character into the cheating wife, for example. “When you finish your exercise, drop me a line at www.stephenking.com and tell me how it worked for you,” he writes. King encourages his pupils to think of writing as fun, and to continue working through any rough patches. (more)

"Song of Spaghettios" nominated for 2012 Pushcart Prize

2011-02-20T18:02:00.006-05:00

A big thank you to Daniel McDermott, the editor of Bananafish Magazine for nominating my short story, "Song of Spaghettios" for the 2012 Pushcart Prize. By the time they announce the winners in April, I'll finally be done with my taxes, so I'll be jumping for joy either way.

Book Review: Patti LuPone: A Memoir

2011-02-20T17:52:00.001-05:00

From Bibliobuffet:

"In 1950, there was Ethel Merman. In 1960, there was Carol Channing. But Patti LuPone is the Broadway diva of the new millennium. LuPone, who is not only a Broadway living legend, but also a successful film and television actress, isn’t afraid to make a few enemies in her memoir, Patti LuPone: A Memoir. Although the book suffers from a redundant and ho-hum title, LuPone delivers with the blazing intensity and brash attitude that has secured her position as the most demanding, explosive and fascinating actress on Broadway today.

Patti LuPone: A Memoir, written with Digby Diehl, is the chronological story of the actress’s entire career, cleverly bookended by two performances of Steven Sondheim’s Gypsy: The first was performed at age fifteen on a friend’s front patio in her hometown of Northport, Long Island. The latter was the 2008 Broadway revival, which earned her a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical and catapulted her to legendary status." (more)

Book Review: Atypical by Jesse A. Saperstein

2011-02-18T17:46:00.001-05:00

From Bibliobuffet:

In the middle of fourth grade, my class got a new student. I immediately realized he wasn’t like the rest of us. He didn’t raise his hand before speaking and often blurted out inappropriate, unrelated comments in class. He spit chewed-up cracker onto his sandwich and ate it in the cafeteria. He flapped his hands like a bird when he got excited. When I look back, I realize that the boy may have had Asperger’s syndrome. But I can never be sure, because I never spoke to him. I wasn’t one of the students who taunted him or called him “loser,” but I did something that author Jesse A. Saperstein considers to be just as terrible: I completely ignored him. Now, I wish I hadn’t. In the book Atypical: Life With Asperger’s in 20 1/3 Chapters, Saperstein recounts the trials and tribulations of living with a mild form of autism that was not accepted as a disability by the American Psychiatric Association until he was twelve. By learning to accept his diagnosis and use it to his advantage, Saperstein is a positive role model for anyone struggling to find a place in the confines of normalcy.

Saperstein’s twenty (and one-third) essays describe just about every detail of his life from elementary school until adulthood. The author regales us with stories of emptying the cat litter box, his Bar Mitzvah at age thirteen and his obsession with Disney movies. It’s not the usual memoir fare, that’s for sure. Saperstein explains that due to his Asperger’s syndrome, his writing is full of “overbearing randomness.” To his acquaintances and a long roster of blind dates, Saperstein’s inability to self-edit is an off-putting character trait. But in his book, the meandering stories are a window into the author’s mind. Due to Asperger’s, Saperstein is unabashedly honest in all situations—this is the best quality a memoir writer can have, especially when it’s combined with a downright wacky imagination. (more)

Book Review: Faery Tale by Signe Pike

2011-02-03T21:44:00.001-05:00

From Bibliobuffet.com:

For the first time in over twenty years, I spent my Christmas holiday at my grandfather’s house in New England. As a five-year-old, I remember lying awake on the cot in the spare bedroom on Christmas Eve, trying to stay awake past midnight. When the clock chimed, I was positive Santa Claus and a pack of elves would land on the roof. After what seemed like hours, I swear that I heard sleigh bells tinkling. Sure enough, I woke up the next morning to discover that Santa had left presents just for me. Today, my grandfather’s house remains almost completely unchanged, but I don’t feel the same magic anymore. Instead, I’m concerned with train timetables, my tight budget, and all of the work I’ll have to make up when I get home. Luckily, I had packed Signe Pike’s debut memoir in my suitcase to help me tap into my inner child. In Faery Tale, Pike journeys across the world in search of faeries to help her cope with the death of her father and rediscover the magic of her childhood.

Pike, a book editor, is so fed up with her grueling New York City schedule that she quits her job and moves to South Carolina to start a new, more rural lifestyle with her fiancé. When a mystical neighbor convinces Pike to go on a meditation retreat to Mexico, Pike is thrilled—until she thinks she sees a small, troll-like figure hiding in her hotel room. Pike is intrigued to discover that she may have seen an Alux, short for Los Aluxes, a mythical faery creature native to Mexico. To learn more about other mythical creatures throughout the world, Pike sets off on a three-month long trip to research faeries in England, Ireland and Scotland—three countries that are notorious for faery sightings. On her journey, Pike hopes to determine whether faeries truly exist and where she can find them. (more)

Book Review: Cleaving by Julie Powell

2011-01-14T21:38:00.000-05:00

From Bibliobuffet.com:

"I was originally interested in reading Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession by Julie Powell because I enjoyed Powell’s first book, Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. But during my several reading attempts, my squeamishness got the best of me. I can’t stand the sight, or really even the thought of blood. And in the first paragraph of Cleaving, Powell is “drenched up to the elbows” in it. As a semi-to-strict vegetarian since birth, I don’t enjoy killing animals or eating meat, and even the red silhouette of a pig drawn on the book’s front cover makes me a little nauseous. Did I really want to read about pigs, and presumably other animals, being butchered? Was I even the right person to review this book?

"After a few months of deliberation, I finally decided that I was the right woman for the job. Like Powell, I am completely new to butchering, so I’d be learning everything through her eyes. Just as the author used butchery to step out of her comfort zone, I would use her memoir to conquer my fear of blood and guts. And best of all, it wouldn’t actually be me doing any of the butchering. No additional animals would be harmed if I just sat down and read the thing. I’m proud to say that after a year, I made my way through Powell’s second memoir just in time for its paperback release. And I didn’t even throw up." (more)

Book Review: Vanishing Point by Ander Monson

2010-12-22T15:12:00.001-05:00

From Bibliobuffet.com:

"When I first flipped through Monson’s, uh, not-memoir, I dismissed his writing style as an ostentatious rip-off of essayist and novelist David Foster Wallace. Some chapters are flooded with endless footnotes, while others are written in three columns, some with no margins. Each chapter is littered with small “crosslike glyphs,” (daggers and double daggers) highlighting certain words in the text that, on first glance, appear to lead nowhere. Generally, I’m a proponent of storytellers who use streamlined language to say exactly what they mean. I usually dismiss flowery writing, and especially flowery formatting, as pretentious and unnecessary. I now realize this was a very unfair conclusion to make about Vanishing Point before reading it.

Monson’s not-memoir is a collection of nineteen essays, some of which originally appeared in The Believer, Indiana Review, and other literary magazines. A few of the essays contain photos of found objects like letters and photographs. The essay subjects don’t seem to fit together at first: jury duty, Doritos, Dungeons and Dragons, a YouTube video of a college a cappella group. But the fun of Vanishing Point is that after reading layer after layer of Monson’s seemingly mundane experiences, the reader is left with a surprisingly complete idea of both who the author is and why we read memoirs in the first place." (more)

Book Review: The Memory Chalet by Tony Judt

2010-12-22T15:05:00.002-05:00

From Bibliobuffet.com:

"Earlier this month, Penguin Press published The Memory Chalet, a series of essays by the late Tony Judt, who died this August. Judt was a historian who wrote and edited fourteen books, including Ill Fares the Land, a commentary on today’s economic woes which was released earlier this year. Ill Fares the Land is a deep look into the social costs of laissez-faire capitalism. The essay collection is a deep look into Judt’s racing mind. The author was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, in 2008 and was paralyzed from the neck down when the essays were written.

The Memory Chalet is a collection of twenty-five essays, most of which have appeared in The New York Review of Books. 'These essays in this little book were never intended for publication,' writes Judt in the book’s preface. Instead, he wrote the essays to help him cope with his increasingly limited mobility as his ALS worsened. Judt, who is able to speak and breathe with a ventilator but is unable to move any muscle in his body below the neck, verbally dictates his stories. 'The salient quality of this particular neurodegenerative disorder,' Judt writes, 'is that it leaves your mind clear to reflect upon past, present and future, but steadily deprives you of any means of converting these reflections into words.'" (more)

Book Review: Criminal of Poverty by Tiny, aka. Lisa Gray-Garcia

2010-12-01T00:33:00.000-05:00

From Bibliobuffet:

In many countries, it is common to share a household with your siblings, parents, grandparents and other members of your extended family. Each parent, child, or grandparent contributes to strengthen the family as a unit. In the United States, families tend to break away from one another and do not usually live under the same roof. Parents get divorced and children move across the country to attend college or start a new job. “Aloneness, ‘independence,’ is valued as a virtue,” writes Lisa Gray-Garcia in her debut memoir, Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America. Independence, however, may not be fruitful without a support system. After her parents’ divorce, Gray-Garcia, the daughter of a doctor father and a mother with a master’s degree in social work, finds herself stuck in the cycle of homelessness and poverty with no family members to reach out to. (more)

Book Review: Bound Like Grass by Ruth McLaughlin

2010-11-09T20:09:00.001-05:00

From Bibliobuffet:

"As wide-eyed children, our parents can do no wrong. In adolescence, we struggle with the epiphany that our parents may not know the answers after all. In adulthood, we carve out our own lives, determined to make better decisions than our parents did. After Ruth McLaughlin’s rough childhood living on her parents’ farm in rural Montana, she feels compelled to break free and move as far away as possible. But despite the painful fact that her parents only provided their children with the bare minimum on the struggling farm, McLaughlin still feels emotionally tied to the harsh life she once lived with her family. In Bound Like Grass: A Memoir from the Western High Plains, McLaughlin comes to terms with her threadbare childhood and the parents who were unable to offer her more." (more).

Book Review: The Adderall Diaries by Stephen Elliott

2010-11-01T01:19:00.000-04:00

From Bibliobuffet:

"In college, I once started a term paper at 3:00 in the morning. It was due at 8:00 AM. “Just take some of my Adderall,” my roommate suggested. “It’s the only way you have a prayer of finishing that thing.” My roommate was diagnosed with ADHD, but she frequently used her medication to perform all-nighters so she could cram for exams and finals. Realizing the pill was my only hope, I took it. I finished the paper with time to spare and I ended up getting an A. In The Adderall Diaries, which has been released in paperback this month, author Stephen Elliott uses Adderall to clear his writer’s block while he documents a murder trial and unearths new revelations about his own upbringing.

In the opening lines, Elliott breaks open his prescribed Adderall capsules and pours them into his orange juice. Adderall is an amphetamine medication that provides the patient with a steady, sharp attention span when taken in small doses. “Without the Adderall I have a hard time following through on a thought,” the author writes. “My mind is like a man pacing between the kitchen and the living room, always planning something in one room then leaving as soon as he arrives in the other.” Although Elliott’s dosage fluctuates throughout the book, there is no doubt that by snorting or dissolving the pills to get a stronger amphetamine boost, he is not taking the medication the way his doctor has prescribed. (more)

Book Review: The Peep Diaries by Hal Niedzviecki

2010-10-10T19:33:00.002-04:00

From Bibliobuffet.com:

"Every morning before I start my workday, I make myself a cup of tea, check my e-mail, and log on to Facebook. I’m not sure when signing on to Facebook changed from a once-in-a-while occurrence to part of my every day routine, but I've had an account since 2004, when the site was launched. Back then, the features were minimal and glitchy. 'There’s no way this will ever replace Friendster,' I remember saying to a friend from college. But now, because I work at home, I use Facebook to connect with my coworkers and clients during the day. I use it as my virtual water cooler, to chat to friends during my coffee or lunch break. It’s completely replaced my need for a tangible workplace environment. According to Hal Niedzviecki, author of The Peep Diaries, the Peep Culture phenomenon has completely taken over my life, and probably not for the better." (more)

Book Review: Writing New York

2010-09-27T16:00:00.002-04:00

From Bibliobuffet:

"Last week, my inbox was flooded with forwarded e-mails sharing an article that recently appeared in the satire newspaper The Onion. The article, entitled '8.4 Million New Yorkers Suddenly Realize New York City a Horrible Place to Live,' imagines a time when every single New Yorker would suddenly get sick of the rodent infestations, the pollution and the outrageous rent hikes at the exact same time and head for the suburbs. Of course, The Onion is only satire, and most of my New York friends are staying put. I’ve always wondered if New York will ever become too expensive, too dirty or too impractical to house its tenants, and after the shutting of the 42nd Street AMC Movie Theater last month due to a bedbug infestation, maybe the end is near. But reading a three-book series about New York this week, I discovered that while New York has changed since the early 1900s, its constantly beating pulse is what continues to make it an inspirational city to so many people, decade after decade." (more)

The Inspiration Collective: JM Tohline Update

2010-09-09T14:42:00.001-04:00

In July, I interviewed writer JM Tohline as a part of my series of artist interviews, The Inspiration Collective. Since the interview, JM received some wonderful news about his most recent project. Yesterday I received an email from JM letting me know that his first novel, The Great Lenore, will be published by Atticus Books in Summer 2011. Congratulations, JM! I can't wait to read it.

Book Review: Chasing Miracles by John F. Crowley

2010-09-09T14:33:00.002-04:00

From Bibliobuffet:

"Something tells me that John F. Crowley’s life motto may be Ghandi’s famous adage, 'be the change you want to see in the world.' Crowley, the author of his first memoir, Chasing Miracles (co-authored by Ken Kurson, who has also co-authored memoirs by Rudy Giuliani and David Faber) may have led a humble, boring life if not for his three extraordinary children, Megan, Patrick and John Jr. Instead, Crowley and his wife, Eileen provide around-the-clock medical care for one child that suffers from ADHD and dyslexia, and two children with Pompe disease, a rare neuromuscular disorder. Besides Chasing Miracles, the family has been the subject of the book The Cure by Geeta Anand, and the movie Extraordinary Measures, starring Harrison Ford and Brendan Frasier." (more)

Book Review: Healing Hearts by Kathy Magliato, MD

2010-08-22T22:25:00.000-04:00

From Bibliobuffet:

"Kathy Magliato is no ordinary mother. On the first day of school, she wakes up before dawn to pack her two young sons a healthy and environmentally friendly lunch. “There will be carrots with organic dressing for dipping,” Magliato writes in her memoir, Healing Hearts. “There will be freshly steamed broccoli. There will be three types of cherry tomatoes that I carefully selected from the Santa Monica Wednesday-morning farmer’s market. For dessert there will be sliced ripe green melon with organic cheese squares.” Magliato takes great care packing her sons’ first-day-of-school lunch, “relishing this work that makes me feel like a mommy. A real mommy,” because before she is able to eat lunch herself, Doctor Kathy Magliato will be in surgery, performing a quadruple bypass as one of the only female heart surgeons in the United States. In her memoir, Healing Hearts, Magliato gives readers a taste of her impossibly busy schedule as a mother, wife and surgeon at St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica and Torrance Memorial Medical Center in Torrance, California." (more)

Book Review: No Place Like Home by Brooke Berman

2010-08-06T14:35:00.001-04:00

From Bibliobuffet:

"In New York City, finding an apartment isn’t easy. First, the prospective tenant must find a place to live that is both currently for rent and something that he or she can actually afford. After passing these hurdles, “You need proof of income, bank statements, pay stubs, and very often, a ‘guarantor,’” writes Brooke Berman in her debut memoir, No Place Like Home: A Memoir in 39 Apartments. A guarantor, Berman explains, is a relative with money who must promise to pay in the event that the tenant is unable to. “The process is as fierce and intense as applying to graduate school,” Berman explains.

"It may seem impossible to believe that the author has willingly lived in thirty-nine (mostly) New York apartments over the past twenty years, but Berman’s book explains, in intricate detail, how it is possible that her life has contained so many moving days. And frankly, it shouldn’t be so unbelievable for most New Yorkers. In my six years in New York City, I moved five times, while my boyfriend moved ten times. Although these numbers may not quite measure up to Berman’s whopping statistics, let me note that she also considers house sitting her friends’ apartments and staying in hotels during work projects in her numbers. If I included the times when I was between apartments and crashing on a friend’s couch or floor, my number of moves would be more like fifteen." (more)

Book Review: Bonobo Handshake by Vanessa Woods

2010-07-19T20:24:00.002-04:00

From Bibliobuffet:

"When Vanessa Woods is invited by her fiancé, research scientist Brian Hare, to study bonobos at a sanctuary in Congo, she is perplexed. “Is that some kind of tree?” she asks. Although Woods has made a name for herself as an accomplished chimpanzee researcher, she has never heard of their relatives, the bonobos. In fact, Woods writes in her memoir, Bonobo Handshake, that the word “bonobo” is so off the radar, it doesn’t even show up on her computer’s spell check.

"Woods is surprised by her unfamiliarity with bonobos because they are so closely related to chimpanzees. While chimps live in the wild in both Central and West Africa, bonobos are only found in Congo and are considered an endangered species. Bonobos and humans have 98.7 percent of their DNA in common, says Woods, but unlike chimpanzees, the link between humans and bonobos has only rarely been studied.

"Although she is unsure about making the trip, Woods follows Brian to the violent and dangerous Congo, which, in 2005, was in shambles after the Second Congo War. Despite the high crime rate and outrageous death toll, Woods and Brian head to Lola Ya Bonobo, a privately funded sanctuary designed to rescue bonobos from poachers who try to kill the apes or sell them as pets." (more)

Book Review: Keith Haring Journals

2010-07-11T14:24:00.003-04:00

From Bibliobuffet:

I generally feel a little uncomfortable reading another person’s journal. I’m talking about reading a published journal, not sneaking into someone’s bedroom and picking the lock with a paperclip, but it still feels a little bit too voyeuristic to me. Did the writer intend to release the journal to the public, and if so, how do I know this to be the case? How would the author feel about his personal, secret feelings sitting on a bookstore shelf? So this week, although I was excited to read the journal of one of my favorite New York City artists, I was also a bit hesitant. Haring, who died of AIDS at age thirty-two, had been deceased for seven years when his journals were originally published in 1997. Before opening the book, I made the decision that I would not review Keith Haring Journals if I felt the book to be a breach of his privacy in any way.

I was relieved that, despite the personal nature of Haring’s entries, his journal was very clearly written for the public. Haring provides instructions to his readers, particularly in his earlier entries. While studying art at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Haring tells his readers to “not place too much emphasis on my current experimentation and investigations.” Even before the success of his career as a street and mural artist, Haring seemed prepared for a large, adoring public to pour over his journal.

The recently re-released version of Keith Haring Journals contains a new passage about the book by prolific street artist, Shepard Fairey. The pairing of Haring and Fairey must have seemed logical when the new edition of the book was published, particularly considering Fairey, the creator of the “OBEY” stencils that seem to have taken over the world of street art, named Haring as an influence in a 2009 Los Angeles Times article. Earlier this year, Fairey installed a large street mural on the corner of Bowery and East Houston Street in New York City. The location was originally the site of an untitled Keith Haring mural, which was painted in 1982 and then restored in 2008. Some Keith Haring fans have taken offense at the new Fairey mural and kicked holes in it. One Haring fan spray-painted his opinion over the mural: “Bring back the Haring.” Despite the posthumous feud, Fairey writes a thoughtful summary for readers who are too busy to read all four hundred pages of the complete journal. (more)

The Inspiration Collective: JM Tohline

2010-07-01T16:54:00.004-04:00

The Inspiration Collective is a weekly column featuring interviews with emerging artists.

Over the last ten years, JM Tohline has written four novels, and has thrown three of them in the trash. His fourth novel, THE GREAT LENORE, is crawling toward publication along many paths at once, and his new work in progress, BLUE THE PERSON, is buzzing toward completion. You can find a sample of THE GREAT LENORE—and can find some of his other writings, including the EAT TO STAY ALIVE project—on his website at jmtohline.com. You can also find him hiding on Twitter @JMTohline.

Do you remember the first story you ever wrote?

I guess there are really two answers to this question. If I dig through old notebooks of mine—third grade notebooks, fourth grade notebooks—I find “novels” and stories I wrote back then. Some of them, I remember writing. Others of them, I don’t remember writing. The first story I wrote after deciding that I “wanted to be a writer,” however, was in the summer of 2000, when I was 15 years old. It was nighttime. Rain was falling outside. And I closed myself in my room and wrote the first 15 pages of a story set in Boston during the Revolutionary War. I still have that story somewhere, and actually… Well, it’s not half bad! I remember how fulfilled I felt after finishing that first night of writing. It’s quite a thrill to find that one particular thing you were born to do!

On your website, you speak publicly about your "break-up" with your literary agent earlier this year. Do you feel that this professional setback (if you would consider it to be a setback) has affected your inspiration or working style in any way? Has sharing the event created any sense of community among your readers and peers?

I have found that a lot of “young, on-the-verge” artists try to act invincible, as if the public admission of any failures or setbacks are embarrassing and should be hidden in the back of a closet. Part of this tendency stems from the fact that most artists, by nature, are private, introspective individuals. So then, the thought process goes: If I am directly sharing so little of my personal life with the outside world, it sure won’t make me look good if the one thing that sticks in everyone’s mind is that things aren’t going well for me! But really, people need to know that nothing is all-the-way perfect. It makes them feel more comfortable in their own uphill climb. Enduring this process—where I landed an excellent, well-connected agent and experienced the thrill of knowing that my full manuscript was on the desk of big-name editors at big-name publishing houses, only to have things fall apart with my agent, leaving me on my own once again—has helped me to realize that we’re all on this uphill climb together. Some writers have climbed higher (much higher!) than I have, and others are trickled out below me, but all of us are climbing. It was difficult to admit to everyone, “Yeah, remember the big deal about me landing an awesome agent and all? Um… Scratch that.” But I frequently receive emails from writers who thank me for sharing that information, and it’s nice to know that my experiences are helping others learn the process. Furthermore, it’s helped me to feel freer, knowing that everything is out there, that I’m being transparent, and that situations and circumstances are constantly changing!

Do you outline or plan your stories and pieces before you write them, or do you write as you go along?

I never plot or “outline” a story before beginning, as I feel that this can constrict the growth and spontaneity of a story. However, I always begin with a solid idea of where a story is going, and I especially emphasize the pre-writing portions of this process that enable me to get to know the characters as well as possible. I feel that the best stories are those that make the reader feel as if the story really happened, rather than leaving them to feel as if everything is fabricated and no thicker than the page itself. When a writer knows their characters the way they know a real-life friend or family member, this depth shows through to the reader!

Do you write mostly in notebooks, at the computer, at a typewriter, etc.? Are you a "carry a notebook during the day to write stuff in" writer, or a "remember and write it down when I get home" writer?

I do (almost) all of my first-draft writing with a fountain pen and paper. Of course, this is probably the least efficient writing method in the world! But I love the way it feels, and it slows my mind down enough that I can really sink into the story instead of just skipping across the surface. I have notebooks all over my room, and all over my person. I’m constantly pulling out a notebook or a pile of index cards and jotting down thoughts, notes, ideas, etc. It’s probably annoying to people around me, but it helps me to maintain the story all the way through the process.

Do you feel that your writing is being channeled from another force, or that it's coming from deep inside you? How best can you describe where your writing and inspiration comes from?

I certainly think an excellent goal is to say, "It would be nice, 100 years from now, if some young writer were to say to his buddies in confidence, 'You know what? I think I’m channeling the spirit of JM Tohline in my writing.'" That would truly be an awesome accomplishment. The closest I come, myself, to channeling is when I am writing in first person—I try to really get into the mindset of that character before I begin writing. Sometimes this entails the clothes I’m wearing, other times the food I’m eating, and other times such things as where or how I’m sitting, the handwriting I use, the music I listen to, and so on.

Can you walk me through the schedule of a typical day for you, day job and all?

I wish that sleep was optional—as is the case, however, the only part of sleep that’s optional is the amount of sleep required. I usually go to bed at around six in the morning and get up at eleven or noon. Whenever possible, I like to do my writing (at least two hours) and reading (at least an hour and a half) before I do anything else. This isn’t always possible, but whenever I’m able to construct my day in this manner it makes me feel much stronger moving forward. In the evenings, I usually accomplish whatever responsibilities are hanging over me, and at about six in the evening I take my daily “three hour relax break,” which usually entails watching the Red Sox game and reading. After the game ends, it’s off to work! I am a full-time freelance writer/editor, so I’m able to work from home (or from wherever I would like) and to set my own hours, but I work best at nighttime, so I usually go from nine until whenever I finish, and if I finish early I’ll read for a bit before going to bed at six and starting over again!

Do you do anything else creative to help inform your writing, like drawing, music, reading, etc.?

I always compose a project-specific Writing Playlist whenever I’m working on a story. I like to find musicians whose passion comes through in their craft (it’s the same way with the authors and painters I most enjoy). The way I feel is: The more passionate work you surround yourself with, the more passionately you’ll feel about your own craft! The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, The Smiths, The White Stripes, Lisa Hannigan, Death Cab For Cutie, etc.—these are some of the artists whose passion really gets me going.

The Inspiration Collective: Erin Gleeson

2010-06-25T02:08:00.016-04:00

The Inspiration Collective is a weekly column featuring interviews with emerging artists.

Photo: Erin Gleeson

Erin Gleeson is a photographer who grew up in an apple orchard in Sonoma County, California, but has been living and working in New York City for about eight years. She received her B.A. from the University of California Santa Barbara in 2002 and her M.F.A. in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in NYC in 2007. The subject of most of her work is food, a passion that was perhaps sparked when she studied in the culinary capital of Italy (Bologna) at the Academy of Fine Arts in 2000. Her work has been published in New York Times Dining Section, Gourmet Magazine, Edible Magazine and she is a volunteer photographer for The James Beard Foundation. Erin's most recent exhibit was a solo show of about 20 pieces at the James Beard House in the winter of 2010. Her latest project is a cookbook called Korean Cuisine (published in 2009). Erin has had numerous group shows in New York and nationally including Lana Santorelli Gallery and Broadway Gallery (both in NYC, 2009). Erin has also been an adjunct professor of photography at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York since 2008. Visit Erin's weekly column, Culinography at umamimart.com and view her photographs at eringleeson.com.

Do you remember the first camera you owned? Do you still have the first photos you took?

I save pretty much all my photos. Now I have lots of hard drives since I shoot digitally, but I have boxes of prints and negs from when I used to shoot film. My first (good) camera was a 35mm Canon Rebel. I got it the year I studied abroad in Italy when I was in college. That was the year I really got into photography. I had friends studying abroad in Africa and India that year and I went to visit them and took lots of photos to bring back to my professors at the Fine Arts Academy in Bologna. I also had a Holga in college that I loved. I now shoot with a Nikon DSLR.

You studied at SVA in New York City, and you teach at FIT, which is also in the city. Do you gain inspiration from New York City and its vast culinary culture? Do you feel that you would take different photographs if you lived in Middle America?

I’ve learned so much about food since I’ve been a volunteer photographer for the James Beard Foundation for the past several years in New York City. I go about once a month to dinner and take photos while I’m there. I’ve been in the kitchen with some of the best chefs in the world at the Beard House. When I watch the Food Network, I love that I’ve met so many of the chefs that are featured. This would not be the case if I didn’t live in New York. Chefs from all over the country are invited to cook at the Beard House. Although some of the most amazing restaurants in the U.S. are in New York, Chicago and San Francisco, I think there are more innovative chefs in Middle America than some may think.

How involved are you with the plating of the food in your photographs?

I shoot for magazines, newspapers and cookbooks, so the food I shoot is almost always edible. I don’t often work with a food stylist- the chefs usually have a great eye and have a very specific way they want their dish to be seen. I always travel with my Photo: q-tips, tweezers, toothpicks, etc. to make sure everything looks great just in case. I often brush food with olive oil to give it a sheen, but rarely use anything fake.

Do you feel the pressure of the clock ticking when you are taking photographs of perishable food?

In advertising photography, sometimes ice cream is mashed potatoes or milk is glue to give you a little more time. I shoot the real thing, so if something is melting, drooping or wilting, I ask for it to be replated. But I shoot quickly, and always ask the chef beforehand how long I will have with a dish. I often only have 30 seconds.

Do you take photos every day? Is there anything creative you wish you had more time to fit into your schedule?

When shooting a cookbook, I’ll shoot every day or every other day for two or three weeks straight. But I usually have about two-to-three shoots a week and spend the rest of the time at my home/studio editing the pictures in Photoshop. A lot of time is also spent communicating with clients, sending invoices and sending out the photos. Even though I love assignments, I wish I had more time to make photos for myself instead of always working on projects for other people. I also teach a couple days a week at FIT (digital photography and Photoshop) and spend a significant amount of time lesson planning.

Your love and passion for food translates so clearly into your work. Do you have a talent for cooking as well?

I do love to cook! Although I am not trained professionally. I have become a bit of a food snob because I often work with high end restaurants whose food I get to eat. I was raised vegan and just became a meat-eater last summer. I finally gave in after turning down way too much good food! My reasons for being vegetarian were mainly social/political-- I wanted to make sure most of what I ate was not being transported long distances or grown with hormones and pesticides. I also worry about the workers who are exposed to such harsh chemicals and didn’t want to financially support that. But I decided I could eat meat in a responsible way, so that’s what I’ve been trying to do. I felt like if I was going to be a meat-eater, I needed to be okay with the whole process, though… So the first time I ate meat, I killed it myself (last summer). I learned how to humanely slaughter chickens on a little organic farm in Northern California. I photographed the whole experience. I still felt okay about eating meat afterward, so now I do! Although I am still learning how to cook it.

Photo: Erin Gleeson

Is there anything else creative that you participate in that helps inform your art?

I just look at a lot of art. I read a lot of magazines to keep up with trends in style and photography. I am also very influenced by fashion and design and did this series of food collages using photos from lifestyle magazines as back drops for still lifes. More from this series are on the culinary collage section of my website.

Photo: Erin Gleeson

I am also inspired by gardening. This is part of a series I shot on things growing in my parents' garden in Sonoma County, CA:

Photo: Erin Gleeson

Book Preview: Patti LuPone: A Memoir

2010-06-21T20:15:00.008-04:00

From Bibliobuffet:

Recently, I had the opportunity to attend Book Expo America, the largest book trade show in the United States. At BEA, which was held at the Javits Center in New York City, I spoke with publishers about memoirs that will be released later this year. I left with an armful of books and an entire notebook filled with titles of upcoming books to read. One book that I am particularly looking forward to reading is the memoir of Tony-award winning actress and singer, Patti LuPone. At Book Expo America, LuPone handed out excerpts of the forthcoming Patti LuPone: A Memoir, and spoke about her life in a small question-and-answer seminar.

I have a love-hate relationship with Patti LuPone. LuPone is adored in the Broadway community, and is best known for her Tony-award winning performance of Evita. Growing up, I didn’t understand the hype. I’d listen to the Original Cast Recording of Evita and cringe. I found her brash singing to be so loud and over the top, I could barely understand a word she was saying. Yet, as a theater major at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, I was taught that LuPone’s command of the stage is powerful, and that her focus and determination are undeniable, whether I actually like her voice or not. So although I would probably not attend a Patti LuPone concert, I was interested in learning more about her upcoming memoir. (more)

The Week of Joan Didion

2010-06-08T14:27:00.001-04:00

From Bibliobuffet:

"I am a huge fan of reading, but I wouldn’t consider myself to be particularly well read. I don’t usually read bestsellers right away because I’m afraid they won’t live up to all the hype. I’m not huge on mystery or science fiction, so those are pretty much out. I haven’t read a classic since college, and most of those were read hastily at 4:00 in the morning for my 8:00 Comparative Literature class. When I’m talking with another bookworm, I’ve usually not read at least three quarters of the books they’re crazy for. 'You’ve never read A Clockwork Orange? You missed Water for Elephants? Oh, I’m buying you a copy of The Year of Magical Thinking right now!'

"I am very lucky to be staying this week with a friend who has a bookshelf full of books that, for the most part, I’ve never read. And I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve never read her favorite author, Joan Didion. In fact, there were more Didion memoirs and nonfiction essays on that shelf than I would ever be able to read in a week. Didion is one of those ultra-prolific writers whose books I’ve always meant to start, but have never gotten around to. Now, faced with a whole shelf’s worth of my friend’s Didion devotion and a free week in front of me, I no longer had an excuse. My friend recommended that I start with the early essay collection, The White Album, and then move on to Didion’s most recent memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking." (more)

The Inspiration Collective: Jeremiah Kipp

2010-05-29T22:16:00.008-04:00

The Inspiration Collective is a weekly column featuring interviews with emerging artists.

Jeremiah Kipp has been a partisan for independent filmmaking, associated with supporting New York filmmakers such as Abel Ferrara, Tom Noonan, Michael Almereyda and Larry Fessenden through his work as a producer, assistant director, and journalist for Filmmaker Magazine, Fangoria and other publications. Film work includes directing CONTACT (commissioned for annual Sinister Six horror fest); THE POD; THE CHRISTMAS PARTY (over 50 international film fests including Cannes and Clermont-Ferrand); SNAPSHOT; THE APARTMENT (commissioned first narrative project shot on CANON XL2 camera; premiered at DV Expo 2004); UNDERWORLD filmed in NYC's Grand Central Station. Producing credits include feature films THE JONESTOWN DEFENSE (Nigrita Films); GOD'S LAND (Vindaloo Philm Wallah); PSYCHO STREET starring Tiffany Schepis; SATAN HATES YOU (Glass Eye Pix); GHOSTS OF PARISER PLATZ (Michael Blackwood Productions); short films BED-THING (Pulitzer Prize winner Matt Zoller Seitz) and THAT'S WHAT SHE TOLD ME (Siren Films) and CONNECT, CONSPIRE, CREATE (Philadelphia Independent Film & Video Association). Jeremiah is currently co-producing a documentary about the making of Andrzej Zulawski's 1982 cult classic POSESSION starring Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani. He is a graduate of the NYU film program with honors. View his reel here.

What was the very first film you directed? How did it go?

When I was twelve, my family purchased a VHS camcorder for shooting home movies and weddings. But as soon as it was out of the box, I wrote a bizarre little mad scientist story and enlisted my grandfather to be the crazed doctor who ingests a serum that transports him into the Fifth Dimension. It was completely ridiculous, shot in the basement and basically existed as an excuse for us to try out the different features of the camera. But we loved the experience so much, we repeated it maybe 300 times during my high school years, making movies with all the kids in our neighborhood. My grandfather remained our resident Boris Karloff, playing all manner of psychopaths, aliens, zombies, vampires... We had a good old time, and by the time I was ready to go to college, I was able to cut together a reel of my amateur films. From all those hundreds of hours of material, I had maybe two minutes worth to put on the reel that weren’t totally humiliating, but it did help me get into New York University. That reel scored me some crucial grants and scholarships; I was a poor boy done good.

Directing requires a dual focus: An intense technical knowledge of how to use a crew and equipment to convey your vision, and a deeply emotional language to get a strong, cohesive performance from each actor. What are your strengths and weaknesses as a director, and how do you manage this dual focus?

I’ve come to think of it as a single focus, where the technical and the emotional are inseparable. I recently assistant directed a feature starring John Turturro, and he was a beautiful example of the actor as instrument. He warmed himself up like an engine, then proceeded to work the scenes through, very aware of the placement of the camera and where he was in the frame and the light (or the shadows), and when we rolled, it was as if he was releasing himself like a finely tuned race car, and where he went would become an emotionally charged, dynamic, organic and alive place. He combined technical prowess with tremendous feeling. Directing, writing, cinematography follows the same principle. The directors of photography I work with are sensitive beings; the way a beam is slashed across a wall or the removal of a key light to create a high contrast mood are not merely technical choices. They effect the feeling and mood of the scene and are created by the feeling and mood of the artist. It is a single focus, and I prefer working with people who put tremendous and sometimes aggressive energy into that focus. I like keeping that high energy on the set when I am working. It feeds me and my cast and crew. As for my weaknesses, I see mistakes in every project I make that were caused by lack of time, lack of money, the wrong aesthetic choice, et cetera, but by that point the movie no longer belongs to me, it belongs to the audience. Let them decide the merits for themselves.

Where does your inspiration come from, and how does it feel while you are working?

I feel like it’s the artist’s job to show up on time, whether that means waking up in the morning and settling in to write a script or reporting to the set and getting through a day of shooting. It’s all about rolling up one’s sleeves and getting to work. Any of the magic happens through the subconscious, through the application of your energy to some particular work. I’ll write a script and rewrite it 20 times (and I hate the word “rewrite” because in fact, it’s just throwing pages away and writing something new. It’s just more writing). I was about to make a film that was commissioned for a Halloween festival, and threw that project in the garbage after two months of work, replacing it with a project I wrote on a napkin, which ultimately became my most recent short film, CONTACT. The inspiration for it came from a painting by Edvard Munch, photographs of Gregory Crewdson, and a nagging feeling that a movie I made a few years ago was incomplete; there were still images that wanted be realized and were pushing their way onto the page. So who knows? Maybe ideas come from some nagging impulse deep within; maybe you don’t write the ideas but the ideas in fact write you?

Making a film is a collaborative art and one weak link can affect the entire process. How do you create a core group of fellow artists that you trust, and how do you ensure that your team is all on the same creative page throughout the project?

When I’m not directing my own films, I’m producing or assistant directing other projects. This enables me to meet a large cross-section of potential collaborators, and by virtue of working together you learn whom the artists are that you respond to. When you choose actors or crew, you have to understand what they do, see what they bring to the project, and you have to love them. When I’m incredibly enthusiastic about the people I’m working with, it’s because I’ve done a great deal of homework about their craft and their personality, but I also feel out their level of intensity and commitment. I like intense partners that radically throw themselves into the work, and I push them as far as they can go. They know I brought them on board because of their excellence, and I show them my level of passion but also my high standards. They know I won’t let them fail, because they’re with me and I’m with them, we’re in this together, and we understand why the hell we came together at six in the morning or whatever to roll on this scene. The conversations about why we’re making this picture happen early, and if we’ve worked together before, sometimes they don’t happen at all because the communication is meta. Most of the crew on "CONTACT" needed very little explanation. One of the actors, Robb Leigh Davis, whom I had not worked with before, was dubious about the nudity and the content, but after one meeting of discussing why I was making this movie, he understood and was like a brother, a wonderful and soulful ally throughout the process. That is the kind of company I like to keep.

Can you walk me through the schedule of a typical day for you, day job and all? Is there anything you wish you had more time for? Do you work on films every day?

The life of a freelancer is never predictable. Today I woke up in the morning and was doing prep work for a feature I’m planning to direct in July out in Woodbury, Connecticut, and also doing some last minute gearing up for a music video. It was a day spent on the computer, typing up memorandums and schedules, breaking down line items, and punctuated by racing around the city picking up supplies. I came home, ate a quick meal, and chased after some funding. Then I wrote out the answers to these questions. Tomorrow I’ll be on set all day in the studio, shooting from 7 AM to 7 PM, followed by crashing for sleep. The following afternoon I’m taking a day off, shopping for a birthday present for my girlfriend and hopefully enjoying a brief reprieve before throwing myself back into my work. None of these days are the same; all of them are spent searching for work, working, and basking in the exhausted afterglow of having done as good a job as you can.

Do you do anything else creative to help inform your filmmaking, like drawing, writing, reading, etc.?

I am not a skilled artist, but I do occasional sketches that I hang up on my wall when working on projects, and surround them with photographs, paintings and images I tear out of magazines, which form into these collages that inspire. But I am also an avid and voracious reader. Most recently, I found myself completely enthralled in "Bleak House" by Charles Dickens, and now I’m returning to "The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov. I love the surrealists as much as the realists, as long as the work is daring and sincere. Some of my friends are able to spread their talent wide, by not only writing but also acting, singing, taking photographs or playing music, graphic design, wine connoisseurship, and so on. I often wish I could be more like them. I played the trumpet years ago, and found it creatively rewarding. I was a marathon runner. But film is an all-consuming entity; it has become the major creative outlet in my life. One must always remember to value your life and experiences as much as valuing your art, because if the art is not fed, it will consume the artist and feed on its own blood. That said, New York City has no shortage of direct experience as long as you listen and respond to what she has to offer.

Book Review: Cooking Dirty by Jason Sheehan

2010-05-24T10:59:00.003-04:00

From Bibliobuffet:

"I like to believe every book has its own pulse. Each book has its own distinct heartbeat that rises and falls throughout the twists and turns of the story. Rather than judging a book by its lyrical language, cliffhanger plot points or overall message, I often form opinions on a book based on how it made me feel. If a book gives me a true emotional reaction that causes my heart to race, I know I enjoyed it. Cooking Dirty: A Story of Life, Sex, Love and Death in the Kitchen by Jason Sheehan has a pulse so quick, it’s almost a heart attack.

Sheehan’s memoir explodes with a frenzied opening story of working as a chef on the line at a Tampa seafood restaurant. While wading through a mess of dropped utensils, towels, food and packaging, Sheehan and his team are cooking in sweltering heat, screaming, “Fire all, fire all!” to get the orders out as quickly as possible and pelting one another with mushrooms for fun. One cook faints, only to be dragged off the floor and replaced by another staff member. Sheehan drops to the ground and is revived by another cook with a bucket of ice water. He immediately jumps back up and continues working to the rest of the long, hot shift." (more)

The Inspiration Collective: Jessica Harman

2010-05-21T13:01:00.014-04:00

The Inspiration Collective is a weekly column featuring interviews with emerging artists.

Jessica Harman is a poet living in Haverhill, Massachusetts. She was born in Montreal, Canada. She studied Creative Writing at Concordia University in Montreal, earning her B.A. in 1999. She earned her M.A. in Health Communication from Emerson College, in Boston, Massachusetts, in 2003. Her poetry has appeared in magazines such as Rosebud, Bellevue Literary Review, Stand, and Orbis. She has poetry forthcoming in Nimrod and Spillway. A loose translation from Catullus’s Latin poem, “Vivamus…” appeared in Arion, February 2010. Jessica’s first chapbook of poems, ‘My Journey As An Unharmonious Being,” was published by Flarestack Publishing in 2004. In 2007 she won the Cervena Barva press online chapbook competition, for the manuscript, “Secrets.” Her third chapbook of poems, “Take Me As I Am,” was published by Propaganda Press in 2010. “Data,” a full-length collection of her poetry, will be published in 2012 by Cervena Barva Press. Read some of her poems here.

Do you remember when you wrote your first poem? What was it about, and how do you feel about it now?

Yes, I remember I wrote my first poem in fourth grade, in school. We all had to write cinquains, which is a form where you start with one word, I used “Medicine,” then the next line will be two words, the next line, three—and then when you reach the five word line, you continue after that with one line of one word—but although the last line of the poem is one word, you’re not supposed to use the original word: you’re supposed to use a synonym. Looking back, I think this was my first introduction to synonyms, too. I think my cinquain went something like:

Medicine

for colds

tastes very bad

makes you feel better

take it on a spoon

Pills

I think the poem was called, “Sick.” I feel great about this poem, to this day. I think it’s because the teacher really liked it, and I hadn’t done anything up until that point that my teachers really thought was good. I was a late bloomer, as they say, and no one could figure out if I was “mentally challenged” or really smart. I could do some things beyond my level, according to childhood development theorists (there were actually some at this one school I went to), but the things I did really well were all useless. Not marketable skills, as they might say. For example, I could draw Micky Mouse really well when I was two and a half. But when it came time to math, I wrote all my numbers backwards. And I was in the slow reading group until I was in fourth grade—when it was discovered, after the composition of “Sick,” that I could write poetry. All the other kids were jealous. One kid came up to me at break time and said, “You’re lucky. You’ve got something. I have nothing.” Well, everyone has something—teachers thought I had nothing, then, what do you know, I could compose cinquains! It’s nice to know you can do something.

Do you make an outline or a plan of your poems before you write them, or do you write as you go along?

I’ll usually have one idea or concept or feeling that I “riff” off of. Like I’ll be looking though a magazine, and I’ll see an image, or I’ll be walking through the city, and I’ll see something, and that will be a feeling, a quality of the light, that will inspire me to want to turn something visual, or something felt, or something remembered a certain way, into words.

I usually “ride the nerve,” as I call it—just taking that one feeling and attaching words to it—it’s like stringing beads on a thread. The words have to “attach onto” the thread of the feeling—and how I do this is to just to focus on that feeling or shadow or angle of light, and then the words that pop up out of the void are what go down on the page. It’s a process of bridging the gap from nonverbal to verbal,
which is sort of like tearing your heart out, or tearing off flesh or something gruesome and ungodly such as that. I think other writers have said other such things, so I’m not alone or weird in feeling
this.

In a poem, it doesn’t work to say things directly, like “Life is mysterious,” or “Let’s feel the vibe of the infinite.” or “Love is real.” You have to sneak up on your subject matter—and yes, I admit, I often have no idea what I’m going to write about, in terms of the Big Themes—I just start with an insignificant detail, and see what words attach itself to that, and hope that there was a larger theme hidden within the enigmatic beauty of the strange, unusual, or somehow striking image that captivated me in the first place.

I did work with more of a plan in my book “Data,” though. “Data” is my first full-length collection, and it’s due to be released in 2010 by Cervena Barva to guide the shape of the poem. An example of formal logic would be this: if A equals B, and B equals C, then A equals C. I wanted to see how that would look if something like that loosely guided a poem that used a more poetic logic. Here is a sample poem from “Data” to show you what I mean:

"I Will Go Over The Introduction To Logic 101"

For all those who came in late,

please take a seat. Here is a syllabus.

If honey is golden, and golden things

Taste like lucky clover, then honey tastes

Like a field of wildflower’s sunlight.

If an onomatopoeia buzzes lightly inside my bones,

And my bones are all I have, then I am buzzing

Like the static of a radio prophesying white noise.

If that time before false dawn is profound,

The way a hangover is when you’re also hung over

From Aspirin, then this is your life.

If a songbird recurs in poems

Like some leitmotif for the rain’s catchall similes,

Then green weather shines brightest and saddest

In the evening. If Eventide is a lovely word

For love or anything else you want it to mean,

Then x equals y in any type of voltaic prose.

What I mean to say is if A, then B,

Is or is not my template, here: it’s about three

Things, the wave, the honey, the crux

Of Grand Unified Theory theory. It’s about the perfume

And the light sweat and the eraser

I use to make the abstract art of the blackboard

Disappear for philosophy 101.

If I speak and my words are already gone,

Then we are talking of literary theory,

Something always already, as they say,

Always not there, always part

Of the equation, anyway.

Let’s make it into a more complicated poem

Next time. I will begin my intro

To logic class differently.

Let us, in future versions

Of this class, start off the semester

By saying our names, and a bit about

Ourselves, where we are from, where we are going.

The poems in “Data” I think are more successful because they work witha prefigured plan. They combine thought modes—they mix a completely rigid academic logic with a more free-flowing type of nonsense. It’s the tension between these modes of thought that make those poems more interesting than my previous work, which is a bit more abstract, or obscure. The “Data” poems take something that I think is true of poetry and flesh out the idea, which is that poetry is a way of being “betwixt and between.” If a poem is categorizable, then we know what it is—we can say, ‘Ah-ha, poem, I’ve figured you out, I’ve put my thumb on you and pinned you down.” And of course you don’t want to write a poem like that—you want to write a poem that always escapes definition, that slips away, that shape-shifts when you try to pin it down, and say, ‘I know what this is about.” A poem should hover, and be confusing, and enigmatic—I think this can be achieved when a poem uses and fuses two modes of thinking or feeling—then the admixture creates something “new” out of that fission or fusion, and that new thing is what is baffling, and energized.

And a poem is all about energy, saying something new, different—but it’s all about modality, too—and that space where you feel that something is expressed that is essentially un-say-able. And I think that consciously having a pre-plan for the poem, and knowing how you’re going to achieve this spark to make it hover in the space between (which is also the gap or the abyss), actually works better. The tricky part is to have those ideas, though—luckily I have a background in both physics and creative writing, so I can always fall back on trying to fuse mathematical or logical thinking with more free-flowing emotional types of linguistic expression.

The place where words and numbers meet is called “fuzzy logic.” I love that term. I wrote a little chapbook called “fuzzy logic” and made collages and scribbles and equations in the margins of the pages. I think doing stuff like that helps make life fun, and worthwhile. Some people think that frivolous creativity is silly, but it’s not. Creativity and exploration of concepts and how we express them is at the heart of communication.

Some days, though, I don’t want to explore significant concepts in my poems, and take the effort to make them a mixture of modes. Sometimes it’s important to just write, to ride the nerve, to feel my fingers on the keyboard. It feels like I’m playing the piano—composing music. It’s a great feeling. I write just because it feels good.

So I guess to answer your question very simply and clearly, I work in both modes—sometimes I plan, sometimes I don’t—both are fruitful—but more often than not the poems that work with clear concepts that I’ve thought about before I sit down work out better. That’s why “Data” was accepted for publication—the poems communicate more to other people, because they play off of established concepts, including “Logic 101.”

However, surprising things happen when you don’t plan—for example, I’ve been writing humorous poetry about diet and exercise, and other than knowing the subject matter, I have no plans when I sit down to write those (so I’m writing them now). I just think to myself, when I’m writing poems about “Diet and Exercise,” what things relate to this subject? And then I turn that into a poem. Anything can be a poem if it is put into the context of lines—if it looks like a poem, though technically the definition of poetry, as opposed to prose, is that it is written in patterned lines, and makes use of metaphorical language. Anyway, so it’s funny to see things we usually see in one context, in another. I came up with hilarious titles for my poems on diet exercise, like “Ode to Cardio Interval Training,” and “Five Secrets To Flatter Abs.” My poem, “Folic Acid,” goes like this:

"Folic Acid"

A serving of fruit is a serving of fruit.

It is not poetic. Yes, it is the apple,

and whether it was a big apple

or small apple, or whether it symbolized

the sin of “The Big Apple” with the lights

of Times Square’s commercial bonanza,

Day-glo and the wind blowing desire

like dust eddying paper cups

near a barbed wire fence in full bloom—

ah, who knew there was so much

to say when we began with a serving

of fruit? A serving is what you’d think

it would be: what can fit snugly

in our outstretched palms.

The strawberries melt

and glisten in the flecks

of ice in the hands of the ice

sculpture at the Silverado

Buffet—one scoop of them.

And I have tried

to write this poem, before, about how

a banana has no fat calories, but forty

carbs. I have also struggled

with what one serving is.

You just can’t come up with funny things like that if it’s pre-planned. everyone knows that humor is about timing. Come to think of it, the ruptures and beautiful moments in poetry also need to be spontaneously composed—but it helps to think about a general aesthetic concept even if the poem itself isn’t pre-planned. For example, I once thought of writing a poem while keeping in mind that the Chinese character for “poem” is made up of two other characters combined—those characters are “temple” and “words.” So the Chinese ideogram for ‘poetry” really means “temple of words.” Now what would a poem that was a “temple of words” sound like? The poem itself couldn’t sustain the whole holy feeling, but I did come up with a line that I like, which is, “I saw the snow falling like tiny shadows made of small sparkles.” I think that’s the closest I’ve ever come to a “temple of words.” I’ve tried to ride that nerve, again, but I always get so self-conscious, because I feel all this reverence, and once you feel that, you freeze up and can’t type. You have to feel a little brash, overconfident—poets are, essentially, foolhardy. If you’re too smart you can’t have the sense of folly that you need to play around with this big concepts that go into making any poem successful. Baudelaire said, “You have to be a little stupid to sit around in your basement all day writing poetry.” So you see, you have to get really dumb sometimes to get brilliant—but that can also work the other way, so you have to be careful. But not too careful.

Do you write mostly in notebooks, at the computer or at a typewriter? Are you a "carry a notebook during the day to write stuff in" writer, or a "remember and write it down when I get home" writer?

I mostly compose poems at my desk, at home, on my computer. I find that that’s the best way to get a sense of how the actual line length will look on the page. I recently learned from my poetry professor, the poet John Canaday, that short lines generally add to the intimate feeling of a poem, and that long lines—like Whitman or Ginsberg used—are for sweeping, epic gestures. I find this “rule of thumb” to be incredibly true—and there are very few things in poetry that are true across the board—because poetry is an art of exceptions—each poem sets its own rules for itself. This makes every poem a task of facing the terror of the blank page in the same helpless manner as you faced the last blank page. Or, glowing computer screen, as the case may be. I like glowing computer screens better than blank pages, because a blank page—especially one that’s in an un-ruled diary where the pages are completely blank, such as in a sketchbook—is much more terrifying than a page that’s got at least something on it, like lines, or a screen that has some indicators of intelligent life, like icons and such. I just don’t like to see that silence, that nothingness of the paper. I’d rather deal with a computer’s interface than the physicality of the blank page’s silent emptiness.

I think that’s why I am a poet rather than a visual artist—because visual artists have to work with the physicality of the materials—they have to face an empty canvas, or page, and put down the first line. And whatever’s down there first is what you embellish—it’s the seed from which the tree grows. To use a metaphor. And with poetry you have another thing that’s already “there,” and that’s the constructs of grammar. You have language—so you’re really not in total emptiness—you have rules, already. Rules are good. They make meaning happen. Once you draw a line, or put a letter or word on the page, then we have something—a boundary to obey or break. We have tension. That’s the most difficult word to write in a poem—the first one. So I prefer something that’s not sacred, not as close to the divine as a blank sheet of paper is. I have a lot of reverence for blank paper. Too much. I think silence is very powerful. I’m not sure why I’m so terrified of it. John Cage, one of my favorite composers, has a book called “Silence.” And he wrote that silent piano piece. Well, that’s very conceptual, but you can’t really be as conceptual as that in poetry—or at least, I’m usually not. I like meaning, clarity—it staves off the silence, the blankness, which is beautiful, yet terrifying.

When I’m out, walking about the city, doing errands, or whatever—I live outside the city, so when I go in I’m usually there for the whole day, and I have time to kill in-between things like meetings or classes or whatever—and I often find myself in restaurants or bars, or someplace like Dunkin’ Donuts or Starbucks (let’s be fair and mention both—product placement—not!! I just like coffee and chai and hot beverages in general, and am a great lover of cafes. I love independent cafes, but they’re few and far between in Beantown), and if I feel the urge to write, I just grab a napkin. I always carry a pen—one that can write on napkins—so not a ballpoint, because that doesn’t work as well as a felt-tip.

I’m not so much someone who feels the urge to write anything in particular—I don’t get struck by large subject matter, often—I’m busy looking in the window of Lord and Taylor or Urban Outfitters (what is it with me mentioning these brand names?—I think I’m just ultra-sensitive to my environment, and I’ve been opening up to pop culture references in my writing, lately—there’s a lot of energy in things that haven’t yet been made into poetic material, yet, in the course of history. I think I’m going to write a book called “Fast Food.” It can have poems with titled like “Whopper With Cheese,” or “Happy Meal.” I think that would have a lot of things going on it about how we live and think as Americans, today, right now. And those poems might be composed on Burger King napkins, and I might have a villanelle called something like “Poem Written On A Burger King Napkin.”) So when I am walking around, out, I don’t carry a notebook or anything—I don’t have lines that strike me on the off-hours, because I have to be in the frame of mind to call forth words from the abyss—and when I’m walking around, I’m hopefully not calling words forth from the abyss—because as a poet I’m spaced-out, anyway, and I have to pay extra close attention to things like where the sidewalk ends and what color the traffic light is. I’m very much someone who has trouble with simple things like putting one foot in front of the other and not falling all over myself—but I can easily write a twenty-five page paper on a philosophical topic like the word, “If.”

Even when I write and I’m in a café, I have to prep myself to get into the “zone” for composing a poem—I have to go “there.” So I generally don’t carry notebooks and such—I just use whatever paper product is around, mostly it’s napkins—when I have forty-five minutes of free time, and I’m in a café.

I do collect “emotions” or “textured feelings” when I’m walking around, though—but I have an easy time remembering a feeling—lately I’ve been picking up on the loneliness of blinking neon—or I think that’s one I noticed a long time ago, when I lived in Montreal. Neon blinking at night in that city is very lonely—maybe it has to do with the French context. How everything feels sort of somnambulant, circular, nostalgic in French culture. I love that. I am originally from Montreal—I was born there. But since I’m American, as well as Canadian, but most of my family is from Kansas City, Missouri. I consider myself American, actually. It’s just more “me.”

You have been diagnosed with schizo-affective disorder. Does writing help you understand and cope with your illness?

A lot of my writing deals with my mental illness—I try to write about it to figure out how I can explain an inner state to other people. Mostly, from the feedback I’ve received, other people who struggle with mental illness find my poems (the good ones, at least) very comforting. There’s a lot to be said for knowing that other people are going through the same bizarre symptoms that you are. To feel better—and this is kind of creepy and counter-intuitive—I read Sylvia Plath’s “Ariel,” whenever I’m recovering from a psychotic breakdown (I’ve had two—well, two and a half—really—the last one I caught myself and recovered before I completely lost it. It’s not easy to “catch” yourself before you fall into complete psychosis—I don’t mean to imply it’s a thing of willpower. I mean I’ve been in therapy for ten years, and I finally identified what makes me lose it—and so last time, about a year ago, when I was on the verge of hospitalization, I knew what was happening to my mind, and I could watch it happen, but I couldn’t help from disintegrating. However, I was able to distance myself from the types of people and the sorts of interactions I was having that were making me crazy—and I just got out of the situation by identifying the problem and then getting the hell out of that situation. I don’t know if that makes sense without giving examples—I mean I go psychotic when a dynamic comes up in which I feel responsible for everything, but at the same time rejected by everyone—sort of a pattern I have. I’ve been able to become aware of these types of situations because my psychiatrist is very marvelous, and we work well together. It took a long time to find someone I could work with. It takes patience, and you have to trust yourself. I think a lot of people have many misconceptions about mental illness—and one of the things I get the impression of is that the “healthy” think that the insane don’t know what’s going on—but that’s not true. The person is still one-hundred percent there—it’s just the interface with the world has some faulty wiring—there’s a problem of connection. And writing is incredibly helpful for re-connecting with others.

Writing is all about connections, between self and other, and self and the parts of yourself that you’ve become disconnected from—so writing is a great technique for healing from mental illness, which is essentially, a disease of the identity—when you’ve lost the capacity to make a meaningful identity because you’ve had to cope by “erasing yourself,”—which is what I call it when your surroundings don’t allow for you to be who you really are—and who anyone really is a very interesting question—how do we know?—well, writing can help—because writing bridges the gap between the subconscious and the conscious, or it can when you write in a way that gets at a deeper level. When I write, I try to get “under,” rather than just glide along the surface. Sure, I can describe the things in my room adequately—but that doesn’t make a good descriptive piece of writing—what ties something together is the emotional meaning of things, of objects—what makes unity in a poem is the psychological complex underlying the concrete images, the metaphors, and all those good things that we’re told to use in poetry when we’re in a creative writing class. “No ideas but in things.” Well, there are no things without ideas. But whatever. It’s what we feel about things that matters, and when we don’t know what matters—when, let’s say, we’re confused, or hurt, or ill, or disturbed—writing can help us find what matters to us. Because to write any type of good poem, you have to get at what matters to you.

When you’re schizo-effective, and about 1.1 % of the American population has schizophrenia (or some psychotic disorder, like schizo-effective, which is what I have), then you need to start to uncover who you are and what matters—and telling other people about it. Because being psychotic is to be silenced, marginalized, discounted—and I think it’s really important to regain a sense of voice, and significance—and connection. My poetry has helped me communicate with other people—editors, first, and then when I began to get some positive feedback, I went to open mic nights at local poetry venues, bars, libraries, bookstore events—and there I met people. I met people that way a few years ago, and it was very wonderful to be accepted on some level—a professional level in terms of writing—and then that developed into a personal level in some cases—and connections, friendships, and community heals people, in whatever degree, from mental illness, depression, and such.

Poetry is about language, and language is about communication, and so it’s all about other people, and what can reach them. Thinking about concepts of what’s intelligible to other people is a very helpful mental exercise. It gets you to deal with reality. I agree with Foucault when he says that reality is a social construct—it’s simply what other people also agree is real. For example, if I think I am God (which I don’t), but let’s say I do—then I am not God if other people don’t believe I’m God. However, if I think I’m God, and other people also think I’m God—let’s say the whole world or maybe a third or some huge number—then, I would in fact be God, for as long as a significant number of people believed I was. Well, I suppose that was a controversial example—but that’s just the example that came to mind because I’ve been writing about Sylvia Plath, and I was seeing a bit of a messiah complex in her work, so that’s the first thing I thought of.

I have never actually thought I was God, but I have seen God, or God’s energy, but that’s rather embarrassing—and it’s a psychotic symptom that happened to me over ten years ago, during my first break. People asked me what that type of energy looks like. It’s like the world breaks in every direction possible. It’s like Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” in all five of senses—it’s all swirling like one alive, grotesquely beautiful scintillating primal soup. But you see, that type of thing doesn’t communicate very well to other people. And it’s not that interesting. Because it’s a psychotic symptom, a sickness—and to me, and to most people—it’s the way to health, which is a vision of shared reality, that’s interesting. Because when we connect in a real way, then we’re getting somewhere, we’re learning. I think the whole project of life is really to find that balance between self and other—and it’s always changing—sometimes it’s challenging because I can stay inside for days and live on coffee and canned soup, but then I’m not part of things. When I’m feeling well, it’s nice to know that I can be useful, and entertaining—I like a joke by Woody Allen that makes fun of Jean Paul Sartre’s existentialist novels—this joke is from that brilliant book, Without Feathers. And in that story poking fun at existentialism, Woody Allen writes, “Cloquet didn’t like Reality, but he still realized it was the only place to get a good steak.” I feel that way—like reality is a challenge, for everyone, but particularly for those of us who see things and hear things that other people don’t—yet reality is still the only place where we get what we want, and need, to grow, to thrive, to have fun now and then. Because although solitude and insanity can be intense, it’s really not all that much fun. I don’t recommend it. Reality is much better. I constantly find ways to connect with others, and for me, writing has done that better than anything else, so far.

Language itself is a communal thing, so when I’m writing, I’m also connecting with a whole tradition of poetry and the whole history of the English language. Sometimes I translate from Ancient Latin, or French (though my French is shaky—I’m practicing), so then I would be interacting with the whole history of those languages. The particular language doesn’t matter as much as the fact that whichever language you’re writing in, you’re using structures and meanings that are not your own, in essence—they’re meanings that are communal. When I took a course on Wittgenstein at an adult education center, I realized all this. I hadn’t realized it before—I had always thought I was “alone” when I was writing. But then I realized I was connected to a whole community that spanned hundreds and hundreds of years—so I began to see myself as among, rather than alone. This helped my writing, because once you think of yourself as a part of a tradition, you are connected. And once you are connected, you’re a link in the fence. And you’re not just a free floating weirdo alone in your room, writing away, and not saying anything that connects you to whatever it is you need to be connecting to. It’s about feeling part of things, surrounded by meaning, contributing to that meaning. That’s what health is. That’s what mental health is.

So writing has been a really great way for me to heal—without it, I wouldn’t be where I am now, able to function as well as I do. When I first got diagnoses, they told me a whole bunch of horrible things at the hospital, like that I was going to have to take meds that made me feel uncreative, and that I would be unmotivated for the rest of my life. They didn’t quite use those words—I think they said, “You’re going to have to get used to not being creative anymore. Your life will be different from now on.” And I was afraid. And for a year after my first breakdown, all I did was sleep—even going to the pharmacy once a month to get my meds was a huge deal, because everything was slow and blurry, and so much effort—and I didn’t feel like doing anything creative. But then I was just patient, and took my meds, and eventually I felt like keeping a journal—I think I just forced myself to keep one—and I wrote some weird poems about Venus coming up from a red apocalyptic sea—I don’t know what that means—but I use Venus as an image to this day. I’m sort of attached to it, because it was my first experience of rebirth after my breakdown—and it happened in a series of short poems I wrote. So I did begin to write—and when I began, I was reborn. Writing was the first step to coming back from the vast unconscious sea of lethargy. I don’t know where those poems are, now—I throw away my journals eventually, when I want to rid myself of old phases—but I carry the sense of them with me. They mean something to me.

I do write a lot of rough drafts, or things that I hope will be good but ultimately don’t communicate to anyone else in any sort of profound way—but it’s what I call “practice rounds.” You’ve got to practice, and I write a lot of rough stuff that I never go back and edit—but an image that I used well, or a concrete object that I’ve never used before, will survive in my mind, and I’ll have “earned” it—I think someone once said that you have to “earn” your words—so my “practice rounds” are when I “earn” my words. Of course, most of the time, when I sit down at my computer to write, my goal is to turn out the most beautiful poem ever—but this, first of all, is impossible—because every poem falls short of the ideal standard it sets for itself—there is what the poem requires of itself and then there’s the percentage of its potential that the poem fulfills—but often I just get “space junk” instead of “stardust.” I do get good poems now and then, thank goodness—but these are the result of a lot of time spent “earning my words” in rough drafts.

Can you put into words where your inspiration comes from and what it feels like?

I generally feel that intention guides a poem, rather than complete divine inspiration. I have “modes” that I work from, and these guide the technique of the poem. For example, I have a friend who said to me once, “Write beyond yourself.” So wherever “beyond” myself is—that’s where the words come from when I sit down with the intention to “write beyond myself.” I think they come from the unconscious, or the subconscious, or that part of one’s self that is usually unknown and hidden to ourselves. Poetry opens that door—that door to where dream-images come from. A poem is like a dream, the philosopher Kenneth Burke said. I agree—poetry is a swinging door between the unconscious and the conscious mind. Like Octavio Paz writes in his Ars Poetica called "Towards the Poem,” “On the forehead of the sleeping people, the poem is a constellation of blood. When history wakes, image becomes act, the poem happens: poetry moves into action."

A poem is part dream, part waking-state—it sort of hovers—it’s of two worlds—dream and waking. And we never fully awake from the dream—in a poem or otherwise. We can never get “there,” or fully arrive at wide-awake consciousness. part of us is always dreaming. But a poem should be that attempt to arrive, to get “there,” to awaken. Even though that goal is impossible—it’s the process that’s significant. So I think poems are from “beyond,” yet there’s nothing more “beyond” as what’s “within.” The farther out we go, the more we discover about who we are at the core—I think current theories of physics are discovering this—that quantum mechanics reflects consciousness—that particles behave according to what questions we ask of them.

Can you walk me through the schedule of a typical day for you?

I usually wake up early. I usually write a poem with my first cup of coffee. Sometimes I write two poems, but lately I’ve only been writing one poem per sitting. I really should eat breakfast—because that’s a good time to get your carbs. Lately, I’ve been working out at 5:00 a.m., every second day. There’s a gym in my building, and no one’s ever in it, so it’s peaceful. Endorphins are good. Then I come back to my apartment, and take my meds. I always take my meds every day. I know that a lot of people with mental illness stop taking their meds when they feel better—but that’s a mistake. There’s nothing wrong with taking meds. It’s actually good to know I need them, and that I should take them, especially when I’m feeling well, which I am, thank God. So I take my pills, and then I read, or meditate.

I meditate every day, according to a stress reduction technique developed at the University of Massachusetts, by Jon Kabat-Zinn. His book on stress reduction and meditation is called Full Catastrophe Living. I talk to my mother on the phone at some point during the morning, before she goes to work. My mother and I are close—we haven’t always been. She’s actually my sanest relative, besides my aunt, her sister. Actually, both of them are arriving in Boston tomorrow and will stay the weekend. So we’ll drink tea and talk. We’re that kind of family—we all like to talk, and joke around, and be very genuine and slapstick.

But on a typical day, I’ll shower, perhaps, after I work out—and around noon I’ll go to the corner store for food. Bananas. Tostitos. Microwaveable burritos. Some days I’ll walk to the grocery store where I can get vegetables to make my favorite salad—which has four ingredients: lettuce, dried cranberries, goat cheese (crumbled) and avocado.

After lunch, I check my email, I putz around, I write a poem. I might sleep for an hour. Then, I might do several things: go out to meet a friend, for example.

I do write SEO articles now and then—I’m just branching out into this field. So when I have an assignment, my day goes something like this: Wake up, have a few cups of coffee, and write for thirteen hours straight until I’m shaking like a hummingbird. Pass out. Sleep for three days afterwards. I have a lot of chronic fatigue, which I’m trying to get over, so when I exert myself I tend to go on a sleeping binge after that.

I tend to have an egg roll or something for dinner. Then I take my meds again (twice a day), and then I sleep, and dream, and wake up, and begin all over again.

Do you do anything else creative to help inform your writing, like
drawing, playing music, reading, etc.?

I think the best creative fuel for a writer is reading. Read anything and everything. Poetry, prose, classics, cereal boxes, the fine print—read between the lines.

I also love music. I listen to a lot of music—I have my “writing music.” I tend to listen to very aggressive things, either that, or really mellow depressing things. I listen to a lot of Montreal bands, like A Silver Mt. Zion, which is so mellow and depressing and wonderful. And then I love the new Hole album, Nobody’s Daughter. That’s incredibly depressing and aggressive—so then I listen to pick-me-uppers like Vampire Weekend, or Wilco’s album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. I love the lyrics to that album. There’s a passage that goes, "You're quite a quiet, domino, bury me now. Take off your Band-Aid 'cause I don't believe in touchdowns. What was I thinking when we said hello?"

I do some visual art, but the best thing about my visual art is the titles—so while it’s fun—and sometimes when I’m stressed I love to make collages—it’s something totally separate from my writing. My writing is my life—visual art is just for fun. I do, however, have more fun when I write, than when I make art—so I think that’s why I’m better at it. I take it less seriously. Does that make any sense? I mean to say that the spirit of fun and deviousness flickers in me when I think of something in verbal terms—like I think, “What would be entertaining,” or “What would really get at the crux of this concept or issue?” whereas when I do visual art, I’m not taking it really that seriously because it’s for relaxation, primarily, not communication. And when I’m thinking of something in terms of a poem, I’m thinking about what it says to other people—how it can bother than and get under their skin, or how it might amuse them—and I think that’s what makes it relevant to other people—is that I’m thinking of them. When I make visual art, though, I’m not really thinking anything. I’m sort of lost. Whereas when I write a poem, I might be lost, at first, but I try a little—approaching the nothingness and the void from different angles, and eventually I get a spark that can build a bridge from me to you.

Words From Daniel McDermott, Editor of Bananafish Magazine

2010-05-18T12:09:00.010-04:00

The very talented Daniel McDermott, who I recently interviewed in my weekly column, The Inspiration Collective, wrote some very nice things about me in the most recent Bananafish Magazine newsletter. Thank you so much for being a part of the project, Daniel, and for the kind, complimentary words:

"Also new this week: I am interviewed by Lindsay Champion for her weekly column The Inspiration Collective. Lindsay writes fiction, nonfiction, journalism, satire, screenplays, books, she's running for president next term, working on a cure for Cancer, planning a trip to Mars, etc. All this at the ripe age of 25. When I was 25, I was lost in a confusing world of first-dates, Greek philosophy, and electronic distraction.

"This is my first interview since starting Bananafish, Lindsay became our very first Bananafish contributor when she added "Song of Spaghettios" to our inaugural issue, and Lindsay and I first met because she wrote the first story in Issue 3 of Fray Quarterly, a print journal in which we are both featured – a lot of firsts for Lindsay; I guess that's why they call her Champion."

The Inspiration Collective: Jason Tyne-Zimmerman

2010-05-13T12:41:00.010-04:00

The Inspiration Collective is a weekly column featuring interviews with emerging artists.

Jason Tyne-Zimmerman is a director, producer and actor who lives in Chelsea. Jason is currently performing at the PIT in "Queen of Sharks: Monday Night Mayhem," and at Identity Bar in the "CHOMPetition." Jason has a BFA in Fine Arts from Temple University and an MFA in Directing from Northwestern University. Read his blog at zimmertyne.wordpress.com or follow him at twitter.com/iamwrongabout.

What was the first play you directed?

The first play I ever directed was Christopher Durang's Beyond Therapy. It went surprisingly well. Surprisingly, because none of us had ever done theater before. At that point I was a painting major in art school and a bunch of us wanted to put on a play.

Actually, no... That's a lie. I like to think that Beyond Therapy was the first play I ever directed, but it was actually the second play I ever directed. I was in art school and a bunch of us wanted to put on a play. None of us had ever done theater before, we were a collection of painting, graphic design, and print making majors and it was just something we decided to do. But we literally knew nothing about theater. We didn't even know how to pick a play, so we went on the internet (mind you, this was 1998 so the Internet wasn't nearly as helpful as it is now). We found a website called "Murders by Martha" and bought a play called... Geez, I can't even remember. Something about soap opera stars. Anyway, it was one of these really bad interactive murder mysteries where the clues don't really matter, so you are encouraged to replace as many of the references as you can with inside jokes. You get uncomfortable people to do ridiculous things on cue and no one really cares if the plot makes any sense and everyone has a good time. How little we knew then. Well, everyone had a good time, but it left me feeling like, "Wow, that was a pretty incredible experience, but I feel like maybe we could do something more with this theater thing. "Hmm, where could I go to learn more about theater?"

So that's when I started looking into doing theater for real rather than just for fun. I started taking theater classes and figuring out what it is I wanted to do with theater. I always forget about that play... What was the name of it? I consider Beyond Therapy as my first play, because it was the first one that I really took seriously and created as a piece of art.

That play went very well. I guess it's worth mentioning the two plays because Beyond Therapy was actually an incredible piece and... Oh, I almost had it... All My Murders! That's what it was called. All My Murders was a hot mess. The actors were the same [as in Beyond Therapy], and they were doing it for the same reason. We did it in the same space with the same budget. The audience was most likely the same. The only thing that was different was me. Everyone else was still doing this theater group as a social activity, but I was suddenly doing it because the piece was important to me. I felt alienated by all my relationships in the same way that the characters in Beyond Therapy were deeply involved with each other, but those involvements only caused them to be more alienated from each other. The piece was important to me, but I still didn't know how to direct. I was a painting major that had thrown together a hot mess of a production the year before, but I was passionate about the project. In the next ten years I would learn a whole vocabulary of how to work with actors and how to approach the rehearsal process, but at that point it was just me, my passion, and a bunch of actors that were willing to let me push them around a stage. The show was a success because of their trust and willingness to be part of my experiment, and I'll always be grateful to them for that. It just goes to show that you don't need a lot to make theater, just a community of people with a little bit of passion.

You are an active member of the New York improv scene. Do you feel that having strong improvisational skills help your directing?

I would say "yes", but indirectly only. They are very different art forms. I never do improv games in rehearsal and I usually stay away from actor-y type things when I direct improv. I have, however, always tried to be aware of an actor's instincts and impulses and use them to help me partner with the actor. Improv has helped me with this. All performers, all people, have natural impulses that would make them amazing actors/improvisers, but we block ourselves. Acting and improvising are things that we do every day. I wake up in the morning and have a meeting with a producer: I have an objective, I recognize the obstacles, and I choose tactics. In life you take in the reality of the moment and you act based on what people around you are doing. Life is just acting and improvising, but we've got all these hang-ups that stop us from doing this on the stage. My acting training has given me a vocabulary with which to talk to actors, but my improv training has helped me recognize these impulses in others.

It's really helped me to be less of a dictator-director and more of a miner. (This is going to be a good metaphor, I can feel it.) Even if the actor doesn't recognize the impulse within them, I can dig it out. Perhaps it's not a full impulse at all, just impulse-ore. Before having improv training I may have missed these things because it's so dark in the mine of an actor's soul, but now I've got the headlamp of improv training to see the impulse ore, dig it out, and refine it into an acting choice.

You can't really recognize those halted impulses until you've been up on a stage with no script, no safety net, and no direction. Once you're in that situation you've got a dozen impulses at a time. A good improviser will be able to do all twelve, but your first time on the improv stage you do none of them and squelch all of your impulses. I've been there, and that helps me help actors through that.

Do you outline or plan what you would like to accomplish in each rehearsal? Do you let the actors in on this plan?

I do always plot out the goals of each rehearsal. Depending on what the goal of the rehearsal is (every rehearsal is different), I might let the actors know or not. If I don't "let them in," it's not that I'm keeping it a secret, but actors already have a lot to worry about. If they already have enough to work on, I don't bog them down with information that I don't feel is useful.

I used to be the type of director that would purposefully keep secrets from actors. You know, running up to one actor and giving them a secret and not tell the other or purposefully manipulate the rehearsal situation to trick an actor into doing one thing or another. I don't do that anymore. I think it's insulting to the actors. At this point, I really want to embrace the fact that the actors and I are collaborators. I feel it's insulting to actors to "trick" them into being good actors. Unless you're working with child actors, of course. That could be the exception. You know, back in the stages of childhood when "playing" comes effortlessly and "acting" just gets in the way. To treat an adult actor in this way is to say that you don't trust them to do their job. I'm very up front with my directing. "This is what we need to do. Here's your responsibility. This is what everyone else is doing. Let's do it."

How can you best describe where your inspiration comes from?

As a director, I always like to be a conduit for the author's work. I obviously will have a point of view with the work and know what I want to accomplish with it, but to have the work of a great playwright channel through you is the best feeling in the world for me as a director. Some directors don't like the phrase "doing what they play wants," since the play literally can't want anything, but I find that phrase ultimately helpful. It takes the ego out of the room. It's not what the playwright wants or what the director wants or what the audience wants, we are all attempting to have the work channel through us. It starts the first time I read a play. I like to direct a play when I read it and it hits me right in my viscus, it leaves me with vibrations, and I follow those vibrations to wherever they lead. It causes something inside of me. The job of directing is so intellectual. In rehearsal, you've always got to direct from your head. But if your head is being lead by your gut, your visceral reaction to the piece, then you know the work is inside you and you can be led by it.

It's sort of the exact opposite of how I used to direct. I remember this one time I directed The Duck Variations and I had three actors instead of two, and I had some "brilliant" concept of how one was the past, one was the present, and one was the future. And they were also id, ego, or superego. AND they were also mother, maiden, crone. It was heavy handed and something I wanted to do to the play. Now I'm the opposite of that. I now pay attention to what they play does to me the first time I read it. I'll either feel it in my gut, in my heart, or in my brain. I mean that literally, not figuratively.

My favorite plays are the ones that hit me in the gut. The Glory of Living does this to me. I read it and my stomach hurts. Other plays will get my heart racing by the end. Other plays will lodge themselves in my brain and I can't stop thinking about them. If a play hits me in one of these three places, I put it on my list of plays to direct. Then I listen to those vibrations and make it a goal to bring those vibrations to the audience through my collaborators: the actors, the designers, the technicians, and everyone. I no longer dictate what the play looks like to my collaborators. I no longer tell designers, "this is what the production should look like." Instead I describe what it should feel like. If I can get the actors and designers to feel the same vibrations that I felt when reading the play, we can all let the play channel through us, and our own creations will channel through each others, with myself in the center. That's my favorite place to be as a director, a conduit. Guiding the creative energy of the playwright through the artists and the artists in positive feedback with the play and through each other.

Can you walk me through the schedule of a typical day for you? Is there anything in your day you wish you had more time for?

I have a day job, so five days a week I get up and go to the office. I'm lucky that I can make ends meet with a part-time job, so after work I can jog to take care of my body, and then work on the play. That happens whether or not I'm currently working on a show. If I'm currently in rehearsal or tech, I'll generally grab an early dinner and get ready to rehearse. If I'm not actively on a show, I'm researching. This is what I wish I had more time for. If I could quit my job, I would spend much more time reading. Right now, I'm reading three books on fear simultaneously to prepare for Perpetual Pill's fall show. I have another dozen on my reading list, but I know I'll never get through them all. If I could quit my day job I could double that list, get through them all, and still have time for casual reading. I've had Seth Grahame-Smith's Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter on my desk since it was published, but have no idea when I'll have time to read it!

Do you do anything else creative to help inform your directing, like drawing, music, reading, etc.?

I'm a research whore, so I'm [currently] immersing myself in fear as much as possible. I have my reading list, sure. But I also have a Pandora station started that I'm trying to teach to play only scary music. Tom Waits is, of course, a prime artist seed, but have you heard Tori Amos' cover of Eminem's "Bonnie and Clyde"? Creepiest song EVER. I'm also watching movies to look for fear. Not necessarily slasher films or "scary" films, but ordinary films. Fear, it turns out, is everywhere. I'm also interviewing people.

Besides that, improv is a great outlet for processing these ideas. It's obviously cheating to plan on putting in themes or characters or plots into an improv show, but once an idea is in your head it subconsciously comes out in improv. And since we have a weekly show at this point, these ideas are always working their way in subtle ways. Ways that my teammates and audience members aren't aware (if they did, it would be the death of the comedy), because I'm not doing it on purpose, but since improv digs into your subconscious for ideas it is ripe for the picking.

For example, my research in fear often has a lot to do with the news and the media and how they are responsible, largely, for our fear. It's a huge responsibility to tell a nation what to think and what to believe. In our last show, I was a grandmother readying her grandson for his first day on his paper route. I didn't plan on it happening (because it's improv), but eventually she was making him aware of how huge a responsibility it was to deliver the news. It was funny because of how absurd it would be for a ten-year old to worry about the content of the papers he was delivering, but it was also part of processing my research. It's like how your dreams process what you learn during the day. Research has suggested that people who have trouble getting into a dream state retain less information that they retained the day before.

Oh, and I keep a dream journal. That's important. Dreams really do process whatever it is you're thinking about and mentally chewing on, but dreams are hard to remember. It takes practice. The more your write down your dreams, the more you remember them. If you make it a habit to write them down, your brain will start getting used to the act of remembering your dreams.

Book Review: Life on the Ledge by Ivor Hanson

2010-05-10T10:03:00.004-04:00

From Bibliobuffet:

"Hanson’s memoir is chock full of window washing shop talk, which is definitely a first for me. I’ve never read a book that mentions the difference between grimy “tilt-ins” and grubby “belt” windows. Belt windows are Hanson’s favorites to clean because they feature exterior hooks, allowing him to attach his cleaning belt directly to the building. Then, Hanson climbs out the window and deftly balances on the narrow window ledge, using the belt as his only safety measure. At first, all the talk of “belt windows” and “22s” (a type of squeegee) flew over my head, but like learning a foreign language, I eventually began to understand the ins and outs of Hanson’s job, which is far more difficult, dangerous and intricate than I ever realized.

Despite the danger of balancing on a window ledge, sometimes as high as fifty stories in the air, Hanson has had relatively few close calls or accidents. In one amusing passage, Hanson accidentally pushes a client’s air conditioner out the window. “The putty-colored rectangular cube now sat on the sidewalk, spewing a bright-green geyser,” Hanson writes. “It looked bigger down there than when it had been right next to me.” Although the client is relieved no one is hurt, the building’s doorman, who could have been seriously injured, is far from sympathetic." (more)

The Inspiration Collective: Daniel McDermott

2010-04-29T01:33:00.012-04:00

The Inspiration Collective is a weekly column featuring interviews with emerging artists.

Daniel McDermott is a creative writer, journalist, and the founding editor of Bananafish Magazine. His work has appeared recently in Fray Quarterly, Monkeybicycle, Jersey Devil Press, The Murky Fringe, and others.

Daniel has an unhealthy obsession with orange tic-tacs for which he is seeking professional help. danielmcdermott.net

What was the first story you ever wrote?

I’m not sure I would have remembered off the top of my head, but in fourth grade I belonged to something called The Young Author’s Club, and I still have my journal from that year. Apparently, my first offering was called, “Motorcycle Monkey.” It’s about a talking monkey who lives in a giant mushroom and drives a motorcycle. There isn’t much of a plot. The monkey, whose name is Earl, just races around and eats bits of his mushroom house until it eventually collapses. The last line reads, “And Earl probably ends up saving the world."

The first story I ever wrote with a fully formed brain was a high school melodrama about breaking up with my first love, called “Green Swing.” It’s trite, awful, juvenile stuff that contains words like “wallow” and “soul mate.” I don’t remember what the title is supposed to mean, but at the time I thought it was some sort of deep metaphor.

The first story I ever wrote with thoughts of publication swirling in my head was in college. I wrote a short, self-deprecating memoir about vomiting in the back alley of a club before performing on stage for the first time with my high school rock band. It’s called, “Rock Star,” which is obviously something I was never meant to be.

You are the editor and founder of Bananafish Magazine, an online literary journal. Do you think that the act of editing and choosing submissions is informed by your writing? How about your approach to running Bananafish as a whole?

It definitely affects the way I run Bananafish. I write all the site narrative, the submission guidelines, etc. And there’s a satirical, humor-based vibe to it all, which I’m sure attracts writers and submissions within that same vein. It’s not intentional; it’s just the way I’m wired; I seem incapable of writing anything longer than a few sentences without adding sarcasm.

As far as choosing submissions, I’ve been trying to showcase a wide spectrum of talent, beyond that which I would read or write myself. So many journals these days seem boxed into a specific form, as if all the submissions were written by the same person, or a group of people with the same background, education, and style. I want our readers to experience a wide range of literary intention.

Do you outline or plan your stories and pieces before you write them, or do you write as you go along?

Longer work needs to be outlined. For example: right now I’m working on the fifth and final draft of a novel that’s approximately 500 pages, divided into 13 chapters, each chapter consisting of 10,000 – 20,000 words. Something that broad needs to be structured beforehand, or else it just becomes a muddled, blathering, repetitive mess. I break each chapter into four or five sections; each section has a theme, a climax, a transition, and its relationship to the whole. After I have a few bullet points in place, it’s easy to freewheel the meat of the story. Without the premeditated structure, though, it would be impossible for me to craft a seamless, coherent book.

In contrast, a short story, something just a few pages in length, can be written on the fly. Sometimes a single notion or experience will pop into my head and I’ll write an entire 1500 word piece in one sitting, a piece that, were it previously structured, would probably sound forced and robotic. I think that’s what makes shorter works so much fun to write.

Sometimes I’ll do outlines or brainstorming in a notebook, but I’m definitely a computer person. I once wrote that people able to write with pen or pencil on paper have magical superpowers that I will never possess. I guess it’s a generational thing. My parents had an old typewriter, and I remember the heavy clicking sound of my sisters typing up their homework on it, but I’ve never used one myself.

I do carry a mini notebook and pen wherever I go. I use it to jot down story ideas and interesting things that people say. You never know where or when a great idea is coming.

When I first moved to Boston seven years ago, the apartment I lived in had no laundry facilities. I used to go to the laundromat, throw in some clothes, lounge in one of those bowling-alley-style chairs, listen to my iPod, and wait. But then I started to notice all the dialog going on around me. There was such an eclectic mix of patrons – people of all ages, ethnic backgrounds and tax-brackets saying the most fascinating things. So I started keeping my headphones in, turning the music off, and writing down the different things that people said. I tried not to infringe on their privacy; I just noted interesting words, unusual inflection, slang – things I wouldn’t think to say myself. Some people in particular, like high school kids, have an ever-changing lexicon of casual speak. Then I’d use the stolen lingo when writing a character of similar age, race or gender. I still do it today, in coffee shops, subways, etc. It’s become a great lesson on changing voice. Beware the man with headphones and a notepad.

Some artists feel that they are being possessed by some other power, while others feel that it is an organic force coming from inside them. How best can you describe where your writing and inspiration comes from?

For me, it’s just about getting into a creative frame of mind. Sometimes that comes spontaneously; I’ll be sitting around doing nothing in particular and a story idea will just hit me, as if thrown into my head by some unseen force, and I’ll run to my computer and write for hours. But I’ve also found that I can manufacture that scenario as well. If I just sit at my computer long enough and write something, anything, even something nonsensical, eventually the creative juices will start flowing.

Many years ago I read a great book called 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing, by Gary Provost. And he said that when he feels unmotivated he describes what it’s like to be trapped inside a ping-pong ball – sights, sounds, smells, everything. I don’t write about being inside a ping-pong ball, per say, but I understand the exercise. After a few minutes of forced imagination, the creative part of my brain just switches on.

Can you walk me through the schedule of a typical day for you, day job and all? Do you write every day? Is there anything you wish you had more time for?

A writing professor once told me, “Write, every day, no matter what,” and that’s really important for me. I need to feel like I’m not only consistently writing, but trying to improve my writing as well. I keep several projects going at once. My computer desktop is filled with nine or ten short works in progress, my current book project, and any imminent freelance assignment. That way, for the sake of writing every day, I can usually find something I feel like working on.

I’ve been lucky in that, for the past four years or so, writing has been my fulltime occupation. At this point, I’m not sure I could handle even the most menial day job. It’s writing or bust for me.

In the morning, I’m usually reeling from whatever I was working on the previous evening. I get up, have a hand-held, at-the-computer-style breakfast, and reread, rewrite, or edit yesterday’s work. Then I break and go to the gym. Diet and exercise is a huge part of my creative output. Not only am I paranoid about the circulation-thwarting, cholesterol-raising reality of a sedentary writer’s lifestyle, but I’ve also found that the better I feel physically, the more mental acuity and creativity I have. Not to mention, the gym is a great place to think. I can’t tell you how many story ideas I’ve fostered while zoning out on the elliptical machine. Midday is usually spent reading Bananafish submissions, updating the website, and tending to whatever freelance assignment I have, which often requires that I travel to interview someone. Then, when my wife gets home in the late afternoon, we hang out, have dinner, and depending on our social plans, I begin a second shift that starts anywhere from 6:00 PM – 12 AM and goes until exhaustion. The night shift is primarily creative writing. Currently, I spend most nights finishing my book.

I do wish that I had more time for creative writing. I hope, sometime in the near future, my time may be spent entirely on book writing and Bananafish, without the grind of trolling for paying freelance gigs.

Do you do anything else creative to help inform your writing, like drawing, music or reading?

Well, it’s certainly not drawing. I draw like a three-year-old, literally, we’re talking stick figures and circular eyes. I love and appreciate visual art and artists, but the application eludes me.

Music always has, and always will, be an important part of my life and my writing. My path to a writing career was spawned by years of singing and songwriting for various high school and college punk and alternative rock bands. To this day, I feel one of my writing strengths is tempo and word cadence, and I attribute that to time spent writing song lyrics, horrid though many of them were. And I still mess around and play the guitar a little. I have an acoustic guitar in my writing studio at all times, and every once in a while, when my mind needs a literary siesta, I’ll strum a few chords, sing a verse or two, and daydream about thunderous drumbeats and screaming fans.

Reading has become an interesting concept for me. Of course, I do read. I think you have to read and stay abreast of new and promising authors if you want to be a successful writer. But book reading has become something I force myself to do more than an activity that comes naturally. I spend eight, sometimes twelve, hours a day writing, and I have to manufacture time to absorb other work. There was a time, in my teens and twenties, when I was a ferocious reader. I read three or four books a week and tried to fill my brain with epic works by respected thinkers: Twain, Hemmingway, Carver, Elliot, Plato, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Jung, Hume, Hegel, Sartre, Woolf, Wittgenstein, etc. And I think that’s an important phase for a writer to go through. It gave me a frame of reference and taught me the nuances of complex thought. Now, I try to read for about an hour each day, but my mind wanders toward my own work more than it yearns for the work of others. It used to be that my library card was my greatest possession, the library my place of page-turning solace. But now I find myself in the library, not reading, but sitting with my laptop open, surrounded by all the authors I’ve so long revered, and desperately trying to become one of them.

Book Review: "Never Tell Our Business to Strangers" by Jennifer Mascia

2010-04-27T16:14:00.000-04:00

From Bibliobuffet:

"Never Tell Our Business to Strangers is packed with nearly 400 pages of small details of the Mascia family’s whereabouts, relationships and habits throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s. I don’t want to ruin the book too much for potential readers, because the story unfolds so well as a mystery. Mascia’s fierce, unconditional love for her parents combined with the slow realization that she is one of the central characters in an elaborate crime and murder ring is told with decades of stored-up passion and fear. From the additional name, 'Cassese,' that is mysteriously added to Mascia’s own last name, to an accidental glimpse of Mascia’s Aunt Rita smoking a strange-looking cigarette, each small, seemingly harmless moment builds into an enormous tidal wave of vital information. The author’s calm, delicate way of piecing together her family’s life may seem tedious at first, but each detail soon reveals itself to be an incredibly important addition to the story. As Mascia and the reader work to uncover the secrets of her father’s tumultuous past together, the book transforms from a straightforward narrative to a chilling, heart-wrenching mystery." (more)

The Inspiration Collective: Erin Lynn Welsh

2010-04-22T00:56:00.012-04:00

The Inspiration Collective is a weekly column featuring interviews with emerging artists.

Erin Lynn Welsh enjoys living, working, and painting in Brooklyn. View her paintings at erinlynnwelsh.tumblr.com and her photographs at erinlynnwelsh.com.

When did you create your first painting?

I actually don't remember the first time I started painting. I feel like it is something that has always been ingrained in me since I was younger. When I went to church with my parents, my mom always gave me a little sketch book and a pencil and I would draw people. What is weird about looking at those sketch books is that the people I drew were naked. Totally bizarre. I was a complicated child so I do not know what was going on in my head then.

When I got to middle school I do remember really taking to painting, especially in watercolor. I wanted to learn how to paint realistically rather than abstractly and that was a mission I was on all throughout my younger years and into college, off and on. Instinctively, I remember starting to paint abstractly, but I would stop myself because for some reason I thought that was wrong and would not get me into art school. Which is a naive thought, but I was young then. In general, I do not think I really started painting how I paint now or realized my own style until college, when I just painted to paint and everything exploded from there. I truly realized that this is who I am as an artist. I started listening to myself more than other people. That is when I completely fell in love with painting and started to create abstract paintings that were all about shape, light and form, and how the oil paint moves on the canvas. Allowing everything to be by chance and not be so structured until the end. Painting that way gave me a sense of freedom creatively that I had never felt before.

You studied at Pratt School of Art and Design in Brooklyn. Do you feel that going to Pratt helped solidify and inform your creative process?

Going to Pratt for me was not so much about art school as it was about learning about a different environment than what I had grown up in. I knew nothing about Brooklyn, much less, New York City. I think I had been about to New York City about three times before college. I was accepted into Pratt as both a painting and photography [major], and when I had to pick, my teachers from high school encouraged photography more than painting so I went for photo which I do not regret. I feel that photography is the way my mind thinks and painting is my heart, and being able to combine the two now with painting from my photographs has benefited me greatly.

Junior year, I took my first painting class for fun. My work got stronger when I started to paint again abstractly while still concentrating on photography. I feel I need both mediums to balance the way I think artistically. I just feel something with painting that I do not with photography, and that has been a feeling since before college. My photography teacher I studied with for two years, Ann Mandelbaum, would work in sculpture and then would photograph her work. She always told us to work from "here," and she would point to her chest. I don't think she always meant "the heart," but from a place that is solid and real for you. And that is where I work from now and did my last years of college. This advice is the one of the best things I learned at Pratt. For me, it was all about the teachers and I learned a great deal of knowledge from them that had nothing to do with art that has carried through. I am so thankful to them because it has helped me with starting to become a working artist.

Do you start a painting with an overall plan of what you are going to create, or do you work as you go along?

I always start with an idea of form and structure. Everything else, I allow myself to just go with how I am feeling. My work is about a place and time that I have memory of, because I use a photograph I have taken as reference. I always know what image I want to paint from before I start and then everything else with the way I paint it is by choice. I tend to destroy, then rebuild my work. I am constantly working through something artistically or emotionally with my paintings. I can be thinking about things that bring up a lot of different emotions in me, but it is also a place of blackness. It is something I can't describe.

Right now I am just painting to paint and I feel that is fine. But I want to start working on more objective work which might be the photography background in me. I am going to continue to do abstract landscapes, and have actually been messing around with doing simply abstract work again. I want to focus in on a photography project I started a couple of years ago called "To Carry Quietly" which is about documenting women who are survivors of breast cancer in the same light I saw my own mother in, who suffered from the disease. I always felt that there was something missing from the project. I have decided to paint the images by connecting them to what my mother went through and what the [subjects] shared with me visually with their bodies. I have a lot of work ahead of me with this project. But it is a great challenge and for me painting is all about the challenge of learning and discovering more about yourself and your abilities as you paint. I thrive from it.

I notice that any of your art pieces, whether they are photographs or paintings, contain a similar palette of colors. I see a lot of red, peach, pink and tan in your work. If this is intentional, can you tell me a little bit about this palette and why you are drawn to it?

I tend to work with them a lot because there is a naturalness and lush feeling with those colors that I enjoy. Also, they can act as a neutral color very easily, which allows me to work with bolder colors in certain work to accentuate them. In my photography and painting, I am always using natural light or trying to depict natural light in my work. If it is a painting, and I tend to see those colors more in natural light. Along with yellow, which has been a base color in most of my recent work. I think it is the softness of those colors and how you can add hints or washes of other colors very subtly that can make the painting more or less.

Nowadays, in certain works, it's all about the subtle shifts of color. I am trying to not be so bold and "in your face" with color, and I am wanting to find a middle ground between the two shifts of bold and subtle colors. It's a challenge for me because color-wise, I tend to make things look too morbid by accident, so I am trying to focus on being softer while still having an emotional moody quality. And I guess that is what I was saying before about destroying and then rebuilding with my paintings. I tend to go too bold sometimes and then have to tone it down.

I've been trying recently to work with different palettes. I have been very attracted to working with more purples, yellows, greens and blues. The combination of those colors is pleasing something inside of me recently, but there is still a lot of tan and peach in the painting I am working on now too. So maybe using those colors are just simply a natural palette.

What is a normal day for you like? Do you work on art every day? Is there anything you wish you had more time for?

Right now, I am working seven days a week, with three jobs. First, my art; second, teaching art for the YWCA of NYC to K through 5th graders; third, I work at a coffee shop in Soho on the weekends. But my hours are less than what they were last year. Last year, I worked 50-hour weeks and got no painting done. Now I have time to paint but less money. I am excited for the summer when my schedule will be better and I will make some more cash to be able to have a social life again. All I do is eat, work, and paint, that is it. I miss my friends and spending time with them. But right now for me it is all about my work, and my dedication has started to pay off.

I usually wake up around 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning make some tea or get an iced coffee, and then prep for class or research shows to apply to. Then I go to work, come home, and just paint until very late at night. I have been a little bit lazy recently with painting, because I was working really hard on trying to get three done within a very short period of time to apply for shows and felt a bit burnt out. Soon that will change, because I have a commission I need to start working on. I really live paycheck to paycheck. I guess I am a starving artist in some ways (although I hate that term), because I spend more money on my supplies than on food. But I feel that [working three jobs] will help build some character and will pay off in more than one way eventually. One of my paintings just got into a gallery in Rhode Island which is a start with some good things to come.

Is there anything else creative that you participate in that helps inform your art?

Music, it is all about music. I will even listen to the same song over and over again if it helps my creative process. I also tend to listen to music that has an earth beat to it, with drums, or an album that is cohesive and flows from song to song. That helps my creative mind set flow and not feel all over the place. Usually I need to be alone when I paint, as well. It is all about connecting to yourself and allowing everything else to happen from there.

I need to start writing more about my work, I have been having to write artist statements recently and it has been very hard for me to put all of my thoughts into something cohesive. I need to write in the moment. I love to dance, and sometimes I do while I am painting and listening to music. Photographing new ideas sparks inspiration in me as well, and gets me excited to go home and paint those images. I need to do more of that as well. I have been trying to finish what I have right now with images I have been wanting to paint.

I also have been doing some more research on other artists. I tend not to like to do this, because I want my style to come from within and not be influenced by other artists. I have been reading more about how certain artists think about their work, such as John Singer Sargent, Amsel Kiefer, Joan Mitchell, Cecily Brown and Georgia O'Keefe. The one idea I see within their work, which is all very different, is that they stuck with one style that is true to them, and kept with it, even as art movements changed. That is inspirational to me. The freedom of being yourself and not changing your art just to sell or please others. It is all about your own discovery.

The Inspiration Collective: David M Pickett

2010-04-15T00:39:00.007-04:00

The Inspiration Collective is a weekly column featuring interviews with emerging artists.
paint by Talya Zemach-Bersin
David M Pickett spends his weekdays producing videos for the University of Chicago Multimedia Initiatives Group. He has had his hands in just about every facet of production: from scripting and budgeting, to editing and distribution: from videography and lighting, to motion graphics and even a little acting. In his free time he writes, animates and produces a stop-animated webseries "The Nightly News at Nine," mainlines Hulu and YouTube, and eats delicious meals with his friends. He believes that serialized narratives are the highest form of art and that internet video has already made Hollywood obsolete. Every now and then he does slam poetry. You can find out more about his animations at davidmpickett.com

What was your first animation project and how did you create it?

My very first attempt at stop-motion animated was a failure. I had been making movies with my LEGO bricks ever since my family got a camcorder, but for a long time I would just move them around in front of the camera with my hands, so it was more like putting on a puppet show than animating. Back then I had to do everything in camera, I had to make all the voices for the characters as I was moving them around and I was usually making it all up as I went along. There's a VHS out there somewhere with all those old movies. At a certain point I decided I wanted to make it look like the LEGO figures were moving on their own. I understood the principle of recording a little bit and then moving the character a little bit and then recording a little bit, but I didn't record for long enough so nothing ending up showing up. It was a big disappointment.

I used that video camera for every school project I possibly could. In 7th grade, we had to do group presentations about stories from different cultures. My group had South America, but we actually did a
Mexican story about a guy with a three-cornered hat that convinces someone it is a magic hat and sells it for a lot of money. I knew this would be the perfect thing to recreate using LEGO. I built a Mayan/Aztecian pyramid and painted little scraps of fabric to look like ponchos. I put more effort into that video than probably anything else that entire year. It was very rough animation, and mostly of people walking. But it was a huge hit and I don't know why it was another five years before I made another one. (Probably because it wasn't cool to play with LEGO bricks in high school.)

How much preparation is required before you can begin filming? How long does the preparation process take?

Everyone always wants to know about the time I put into these animations, but that's usually the last thing I want to think about when I'm done. My mom is a big quilter; she collects fabric like I collect LEGO bricks. It seems like she always has at least a dozen quilting projects under way at any given time. A couple years ago she finished a quilt that she had started 20 years earlier. That's not her average completion time, but it's not unusual for her to be working on a quilt for a decade. Growing up around that, you take for granted that creative projects take a lot of time and preparation. So the fact that I wrote a script in 2007 and finish making the video until 2010 doesn't seem like a long time.

My process goes something like this: I write a script. I record all the voices with my talented friends. I edit together the audio into a rough animatic. I build sets and characters. I use the animatic to decide where all the shot breaks are going to be. I go through each shot and figure out where all the major points of emphasis are and figure out how many frames are in between each and I write that down in a notebook. Depending on the shot I'm doing, that notebook will be very detailed or very vague. For Zundar Silverspine, I had to match [the character's] mouth exactly to the words, so I broke it down to the syllable level. But if I'm doing a shot without dialogue (carrots fighting apples, for instance), I might just have a rough number in mind and go from that. It's a lot of preparation, but it means that when I'm ready to animate I don't have to do a lot of thinking, I can just focus on making it happen.

You've frequently used Radiohead as a backing track to your work. Do you feel a specific connection to Radiohead and if so, do you feel that it adds a particular dimension to your projects?

Music is very important to me. I can't focus when it's quiet, so I've got music playing pretty much all day long. Radiohead is one of my favorite bands and back in college I listened to them incessantly. This trailer came into being because I was listening to "Exit Music (for a Film)" over and over again and seeing images in my mind and I structured the movie to fit those images. I never planned to have

Willy survive his fall into lava/red jell-o until I listened to that song. So many of my ideas come to me like that, while I'm riding my bike or doing dishes and listening to music and the music makes me see images and I shape those images into movie ideas. In the past year or two I've been listening to a lot of music by Muse and that has given me lots of ideas about where I want to take "The Nightly News at Nine" series. And yes, I fully appreciate how cheesy it is to say that Muse is my muse, but it's true.

That being said, I still have a deep connection to Radiohead. Whenever I get a new Ipod, the first thing I do is [upload] all of their albums, because you never know when you're going to need "The Bends"

or "Kid A" to get you through the day. If there weren't copyright issues I'd still be putting their music in my videos.

Is there any room for improvisation after you start filming?

Yes. You'd think that after putting years of preparation and thought into a film, I'd have everything planned out by the time I got to animating, but there's a lot of improvising that goes on there. Writers always talk about being surprised by their characters, about how the characters take on a life of their own and make choices that the author never expected when they started writing. I experience that
at all stages of the process, when I'm writing the script, as I'm recording voices with the actors and as I'm animating. I had no idea that the girl on the green couch would kick her legs, or that Zundar would knock Robert away with his tail, or that ROBOphelia would rock back and forth impatiently, but as I was animating it became clear to me that they absolutely had to. So, I don't know if improvisation is
the right word to describe it, I don't feel as if I have a choice in the matter.

Stop-motion animation requires so much discipline and attention to tiny details. Have you ever started a project that became too daunting too finish?

I'm not good at giving up. I'm a completionist through and through. I fully intend to finish all the creative projects I start. However, I have come to realize that I only have so much time to devote, so I
have gotten better about deciding which projects really deserve my attention and which ones I need to put on a back burner. Right now I'm putting most of my creative energy in the "Nightly News at Nine," but I've got plans for several feature length sequels to some of my other projects, a half-dozen music videos and countless other projects. Even with "NNN," I have to stop myself from thinking too far ahead. I've already got the next two chapters [completely] scripted and a couple others in the works, not to mention outlines for whole seasons and ideas for a spin-off. But I really need to focus on the task in front of me, which right now is making a DVD of Chapter 1 and beginning principle photography on Chapter 2. The way I deal with it is that when I have an idea for a project I can't work on right now, I write it down as quickly as possible and file it away, so that when I'm ready to deal with it in a few years I can come back to it. If I didn't write them down the ideas would be taking up precious space in my brain that I need for more immediate concerns.

Estimate how many LEGOs you own. Do you buy new pieces every time you do a project, or do you allow the project to be informed by the supplies you already have?

There are a couple different websites out there that help LEGO fans and collectors like me track their collections. I am really bad at updating those lists, but I easily have 100,000 pieces. I am constantly buying new sets, sometimes I have a specific project in mind, other times there's just a cool piece or figure in it that I want. When I need a very specific set of pieces there's a whole website where fans sell each other specific pieces in absurd quantities. But I'm always pulling from my collection to build things. Because I have so many bricks I can decide to build a soccer stadium and then be looking at the finished results a few hours later. It's great to be able to throw together a set in a few minutes and then

recycle the pieces a few minutes later for something completely different. Last fall I was on vacation with my family for a week and I brought along a little bag full of LEGO characters and bricks. I

recycled the bricks to make several different backgrounds and characters in this video. So I have a huge collection that is always growing, but even a small collection can turn into many different things.

What is the schedule of a typical day for you, day job and all? Is there anything you wish you had more time for?

I wake up around 5:45, spend an hour or so eating breakfast, browsing the internet and getting ready and am usually out the door by 7:00. Then I spend about an hour on the CTA getting down to Hyde Park. I always have a book or my laptop with me. I'm either reading the next book for my book club or working on my laptop, composing e-mails or blog posts, writing scripts or editing an animation or whatever else needs to be done. Every now and then I'll take a nap on the train. I work from 8:00-4:00 most days and then I'm back on the CTA for another 45 minutes (my commute home is always faster, don't ask me why), doing more work or reading. I get home and do some general internet browsing and correspondence, then I am usually making dinner or going to a friend's house to have dinner. When I get home I may decide to stay up later than I should to do some animating or editing, or if I'm being

good I am in bed by 10:00. On nights when I don't have dinner plans I might get a couple solid hours of animating in, but a lot of days I'm exhausted from working and just veg out and watch Netflix. The bulk of my animating work gets done on the weekends, when I can devote a whole day to doing that and maybe laundry. Since I only promise new videos once a month I usually have two weekends where I am animating furiously to meet a deadline and then two weekends where I'm relaxing, going on trips and other regular weekend things. On several occasions, I have used my vacation time from work to get a three-day weekend for animating.

When I'm in the throes of a project I tend to cut into my sleep time. You'll also notice that nowhere in my schedule did I list working out. Giving so much over to my art has definitely cut into my personal

health. Now that it's getting warm again, I'm hoping to start riding my bike to work a couple times a week. My boyfriend has also been good about making me take care of myself, so hopefully I will find a way to balance everything out so I can make money to live, do the art that I so desperately need to create, have a social life, and be a healthy human. Right now I've got three of the four, which is still pretty good. But yes, I always wish I had more time. If I could have any super power it would be to stop or slow time so I could sleep for 10 hours every day and give my abandoned projects the time they deserve.

Do you participate in anything else creative that brings inspiration to your animation, like drawing, writing, reading, etc.?

I already talked about how important music is in my creative process, the other things I need to consume to fuel my creative process are TV shows and carbohydrates. Whenever I animate I have music blasting and a bag of pretzels at the ready. So much of my inspiration these days comes from watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" or "Avatar: The Last Airbender" or whatever TV show I'm currently mainlining via Netflix or Hulu (I just started "Twin Peaks").

One of the things that I've been thinking about recently is the idea of creativity as something beyond our control. The place I've experienced this the most is in my poetry. I'm not a very prolific poet, I've tried on numerous occasions to sit down and write poems because I've decided I want to write a poem. This never works. Any time I actively try to write a poem it comes out stilted. All my best poems have come to me as I am driving or sorting mail or doing something else completely unrelated to poetry. I don't know how to describe the feeling to someone who has never felt it. I will be there, minding my own business, when suddenly the words bubble up inside me. If I'm alone, I let them bubble out and will do my first draft orally, jot it down later and revise it. I feel like the job of an artist is to recognize truth when you find it and to have the courage and patience to share it.

And a question David created himself: What would you say if you were
giving a commencement speech?

Commencement speeches have come up in conversations a few times in the past couple weeks and so I've had them on my mind. I've read David Foster Wallace's Kenyon Commencement Speech several times now and always go back to it when I'm in need of encouragement or perspective. I think if I had to give a commencement speech today, then one thing I would want to say to the graduates is this: "Find the thing that you are passionate about, the thing that makes your brain burn and your heart throb. And once you've found it, do everything you can to do that thing as much as possible, because it's the only thing worth doing." I think it's terrible advice, but I believe it with my whole being. I think the saddest thing in the world is people who live and die without discovering their desires.

Book Review: "I'm Sorry You Feel That Way" by Diana Joseph

2010-04-13T02:35:00.001-04:00

From Bibliobuffet:

"I’m Sorry You Feel That Way: The Astonishing But True Story of a Daughter, Sister, Slut, Wife, Mother, and Friend to Man & Dog. I can’t look at the title of Diana Joseph’s debut memoir without thinking of the hit song by singer Meredith Brooks, “Bitch.” In my formative teenage years, “Bitch” dominated the radio. “I’m a bitch, I'm a lover / I'm a child, I'm a mother / I'm a sinner, I'm a saint / I do not feel ashamed,” Brooks sings, brazenly. But although the title is strikingly similar, Joseph’s memoir is more of a character study of her own friends and family than an unabashed, in-your-face declaration like “Bitch.” In each chapter of I’m Sorry You Feel That Way, Joseph delves into the minute details of her close friends and family. Through the intricate life stories of ex-boyfriends, in-laws and colleagues, Joseph cobbles together an intimate portrayal of her own life while rarely speaking directly about herself." (more)

The Inspiration Collective: Laura Bowman

2010-04-07T14:11:00.017-04:00

The Inspiration Collective is a weekly column featuring interviews with emerging artists.

Photo by Kate DeCoste Photography

Laura Bowman is a singer/songwriter originally from the Philadelphia area. She attended Catholic schools all her life until her acceptance to NYU. Laura obtained a BFA in theater from Tisch School of the Arts, and works throughout New York City as a wardrobe supervisor for Off-Broadway shows. She gigs most frequently at 169 Bar in Manhattan, but can also be seen playing at O'Flaherty's, Cafe Steinhof, The Quays, Desmond's Tavern (in May), and of course, the New York City Subway. Laura is currently recording and collaborating with Revillusion Productions in Seattle, with a demo to be released this year. Check out Laura's music at http://www.myspace.com/LauraBowmanNYC and on YouTube.

I got the opportunity to speak with Laura about what inspires her on March 15th, 2010. In my own artistic life, I've been dealing a lot about the issue of having not enough time to finish everything I needed to do in my day, and feeling like the writing I want to do always becomes my last priority. Laura helped me remember to strike a balance between obligatory work and creative work and to use each daily activity as a chance to meet new collaborators.

When did you write your first song?

I wrote my first complete song when I was 14 or so. My mom had bought me a little keyboard before I started with guitar. I had no real interest in playing it properly, nor did I know how, so I kept forgetting what I was playing. I’m pretty sure I wanted it to sound like a Mariah Carey song, with the pretty little piano intros and harmonies and all.

I stole some shipping labels and wrote the corresponding notes on each of the keys of the keyboard, then wrote on some loose leaf what notes I was playing so I wouldn’t forget. I did the entire song this way, it took me forever. I don’t remember exactly what the song was about, but I wrote it for my best friend, Leann. I recorded it on a little handheld tape recorder, and only made one copy.

I have no idea what happened to that song. It did, however, give me a hand in getting my first serious boyfriend. If I remember correctly, he liked the song so much he took the tape into work with him and played it over the loudspeaker an got in trouble. He later taught me how to play chords on my first guitar. So, I guess you could say, that first song determined a lot of the rest of my life.

You have a degree in theater from New York University. Has your acting training informed your songwriting?

I don’t know if it really has an effect on my writing, but it definitely helps me progress in performance. I am much better at taking feedback now than I ever was before training as an actor. I was very shy about my songs for a long time. I wrote them and only played them for myself, loved them for a while, then forgot them. I didn’t realize until I started really acting that those songs were actually tiny windows that showed the person I wanted to be. Once I figured that out, I started using them and getting more comfortable showing them to other people. I guess acting helped me see how powerful a song can be. Acting also taught me how to make people laugh, which is endlessly helpful when I’m playing a crowded bar or if I start to feel intimidated or embarrassed. Once you make someone laugh, they’re generally more interested in hearing what you have to say.

Do you ever get nervous before performing?

I get nervous before every gig, no matter how small. Usually, I don’t eat beforehand because I get nauseous. I always make the first song in my set a song that’s both easy for me to play and something that’s older, that I know really well. I always call it a “throwaway song," because it takes the entire song for me to get comfortable at a gig. Once I get past that, it’s easy as pie. Plus, my friend Johnny Walker helps.

Do you have any rituals that you follow before going onstage or recording a song?

At gigs, I generally don’t start until I can focus. Usually setting up my gear does that for me. I flip through my songs and refresh myself with the set I’m about to play. I always have a hot water handy in case I get too excited and need to break out the Throat Coat tea halfway through.

When I record, it’s a totally different thing. I’ll hum to warm up my cords, wear comfy clothes, make sure I have my lyrics down. If it’s a longer session, I’ll bring a box of tea with me. The studio is my happiest place to be in the world. I love it. Especially if there’s a really nice mic and I can dim the lights in the room. The studio is totally about sound. No one cares what goofy face you’re making when you hit a note you didn’t even know you could hit!

When writing music, do you feel like the songs are coming directly from you or are being channeled by another force?

I definitely feel that I am in complete control when writing lyrics to a song. They’re always very intentional and planned out. But when I write the guitar part, it’s usually complete chance. I don’t aim for specific chords. I usually don’t even aim for a specific melody. It just presents itself once I know the general tone of what I’m writing, which is usually in direct correspondence to my mood. Somehow my fingers just find the right chords. I don’t know if that’s because I lack training in music theory. That’s possible. But if that’s why it happens, I’m really happy I never followed a formula for any of my songs. I’d rather play something incorrect that is odd and interesting than something standard that’s boring.

The weirdest thing is, sometimes I’ll go weeks without even thinking of writing a song, and one day, usually out of nowhere, I’ll get such a strong urge, I have to do it. I’ll just fall into this mood where the only thing I wanna do is take out a pencil and my guitar and go nuts. I’ll even forget to eat, which is a rare, rare occurrence. So, I don’t really know if it’s some divine thing or just my stupid hormonal cycle. Maybe it’s the moon.

Walk me through the schedule of a typical day for you. Is there anything you wish you had more time for?

I usually won’t wake up until 11:00 or so, walk around like a zombie in my glasses and robe for a while, and make something to eat. I check e-mail while I’m drinking coffee, then take a shower. From there, it gets kind of unpredictable. If I’m being really good, I’ll do some stretches and practice guitar. Sometimes I do none of this and go for a walk, or play my guitar in the subway for some tips. I just got recording equipment in my apartment, so there’s been a lot of me futsing around with that. I work as a wardrobe supervisor for Off-Broadway shows, so I get into work around 6:30 and am generally done by 10:00. Then, I’m out for drinks. I’ll go see a gig or play at someone else’s if it goes late enough. In the summer, I’ve been known to stay up all night walking around the city with friends. Last summer I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge six times.

I have to say, It is very frustrating working a job to survive and doing what you love on the side. I’m lucky enough to like what I do to make money. I get a lot out of it, and my best fans and friends have sprung from work relationships. But I am getting more and more ready for the day when all I have to do is sing. I truly believe that the hardest journeys are the most life changing and the most rewarding. So, while I’m waiting for my time to come when I can do what I love for a living, I’m taking in every step I'm walking to get there, and enjoying it. The farther away the star, the more I want to touch it.

Do you do anything else creative to help inform your music?

Well, I think the strongest creative influence a writer can have is life experience. I try to always say "yes" when I’m offered something or invited somewhere. I spend a lot of time figuring out myself, and I try to always take steps sideways if I can’t go forward. I make tons and tons of mistakes, and I insist on learning everything the hard way.

I go to as many gigs and concerts as I can afford. I listen to people sing in the subway and am always asking what song is playing in whatever bar I find myself in. I watch documentaries a lot, especially about musicians. I try to have faith in myself. I relax when something isn’t coming my way precisely when I want it to, and trust that whatever happens instead will be much more interesting anyway.

To be informed of upcoming gigs, e-mail Laura at KissMyLBow@gmail.com to be added to the mailing list.

The Inspiration Collective: Introduction

2010-04-06T14:26:00.017-04:00

Each week, I will post an interview with a musician, writer, painter, photographer (or any other type of artist you can imagine) who is a source of inspiration to me. Some of these artists I know very well and some of these people I have never met before. All of the individuals I will feature in this new project, the Inspiration Collective, are emerging artists who have had an impact on my own creative process.

Artists in previous lifetimes met to share ideas at salons, bars and dilapidated lofts, at coffee shops and at schools. These days, conversations have moved to the internet, where it seems like everyone is creating all sorts of things every second and throwing them out there for anyone who happens to stumble upon the work. It's easy to become overwhelmed, or to get swept away in the volume of a world of artists all creating a hundred songs and stories and paintings all at once. Artists are forced to choose sides, huddling with painters who paint similar landscapes or musicians who play the same style of post-new-wave-emo-pop-punk or whatever. And although there is so much more variety to be found on the internet, it's begun to feel so homogenized to me. We have the option to view only the things we already like. By refining my focus to a small group of inspired friends, colleagues and heroes, I hope to discover the discipline and joy of self expression that is present in every creative process, regardless of the style or medium.

The first interview, with singer/songwriter and inspirator Laura Bowman, will be posted tomorrow.

The Inspiration Collective (in progress) -
Laura Bowman
David M Pickett
Erin Lynn Welsh
Daniel McDermott
Jason Tyne-Zimmerman
Jessica Harman
Jeremiah Kipp
Erin Gleeson
JM Tohline

Book Review: "When I Came West" by Laurie Wagner Buyer

2010-03-31T20:30:00.001-04:00

From bibliobuffet.com:

"As a young college student in Downer’s Grove, Illinois, in 1974, Laurie Wagner Buyer had never gone hiking or seen a wild animal except in the zoo. But when something felt missing from her life, Buyer decided the answer was to head west to the backwoods of Montana to live in a small cabin with no electricity, no running water, and an older man she had never met. In her account When I Came West, Buyer talks about how she creates an indelible bond with nature as she finds the remote wilderness in northern Montana to be her most understanding companion." (more)

Review: The Slippery Year by Melanie Gideon

2010-03-16T20:03:00.001-04:00

"After a particularly stressful week, the only thing I wanted to do for the weekend was snuggle up in bed with a relaxing, soothing book. Luckily for me, I picked up The Slippery Year: A Meditation on Happily Ever After, by Melanie Gideon, the story of a woman who pours over the small, comforting details of each day. By examining each humble moment in Gideon’s life, I was able to step away from my own stress and let go, one page at a time.

While looking at the front cover, I thought at first that I had received a misprinted copy. The image and text on the book jacket are slightly crooked, like the entire thing got jammed in the printer. The fore-edge of the book itself is untrimmed, which contributes to the erratic look that for a few minutes, I thought was created unintentionally. After checking with the publisher, however, I realized that, yes, the cover was supposed to look like that." (more)

Review: Stitches by David Small

2010-03-01T01:07:00.001-05:00

This week I reviewed a book that has taken its place as one of my favorite books of all time. Stitches, by David Small, is an absolute masterpiece and I would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone, even people who aren't book-readers. Small's story could be made into a movie in about five seconds, as he has already designed every single image, shot for shot, in this book. I have read a handful of graphic books (I mean, usually they are graphic memoirs, but as my editor Nicki Leone pointed out to me, this is actually a graphic, err, memoir) in my life that have been wonderful (Maus), but I have to admit, I usually cringe when I pass the "Graphic Novels" section of Barnes & Noble. I really have no idea what manga is, but apparently the graphic novel section is overflowing with it. David Small's work is so genre-defiant that I think Stitches transcends the line between a dark children's book (please don't give this book to your children), a memoir about a young adult but not FOR young adults (or is it?) and a graphic novel (err, memoir). Whatever you want to call it, is a beautiful, haunting, unbelievable, true account of David Small's childhood that should not be missed.

"Honoring a Champion" at Bibliobuffet

2010-02-21T14:26:00.003-05:00

Lauren Roberts, the lovely and wonderful editor of Bibliobuffet, wrote a very sweet blog post about me over at Behind the Words at Bibliobuffet. Not only is Lauren a wonderful writer, she is also a kind, nurturing editor, who is always tossing me invaluable words of wisdom as I try to navigate through sometimes-difficult reviews. Thank you, Lauren, for all your help and encouragement!

"She came to BiblioBuffet in June of 2009 with a proposal for a column on memoirs. We tested her out, and found her writing strong, her voice robust, and her passion for writing about “people” books solid. We took her on almost immediately, and our personal bookshelves have begun to fill with her recommendations." (more)

Trainwreck: My Life as an Idoit

2010-02-21T14:18:00.002-05:00

My review of Trainwreck: My Life as an Idoit is up at Bibliobuffet this week.

From Bibliobuffet.com...

"Although at first I had trouble swallowing Nichols’ harsh combination of self-deprecation and ostentation, several stories in Trainwreck had me laughing. As a completely unprepared substitute elementary school teacher, Nichols resorts to doling out packages of M&Ms to children who guess a number he has written on the chalkboard. After failing to engage the children in this game, Nichols hurls a package of M&Ms as far away from the classroom door as possible, hoping a fight will buy him a few more minutes before the students get fed up and leave." (more)

The Onion: Bunch of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger

2010-02-05T12:24:00.006-05:00

Speaking of J.D. Salinger, this story in The Onion about his death is so great.

"CORNISH, NH—In this big dramatic production that didn't do anyone any good (and was pretty embarrassing, really, if you think about it), thousands upon thousands of phonies across the country mourned the death of author J.D. Salinger, who was 91 years old for crying out loud..."

If a Body Catch a Body Comin' Through the Rye...

2010-02-04T03:16:00.004-05:00

Ever since I was a pimply-faced preteen in English class, I've been struggling to figure out exactly what is so great about J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, arguably the most iconic young adult novel in history. The book uses none of the typical story conventions I studied in school. The book is, essentially, one long monologue that recalls action, but never actually participates in it. To top it off, the character of Holden remains stagnant throughout the entire book, never learning anything or experiencing any type of epiphany. Since seventh grade, I've read Catcher in the Rye more times than I can count, and I have my well-worn paperback copy sitting next to me as I type. Despite the fact that I can't pinpoint exactly what is so great about Catcher in the Rye in my own words, I am positive that the text of this masterpiece speaks for itself. Because it spoke to me so deeply, it rests somewhere inside my subconscious. And every time I open a phone book, I think of Holden in the hotel room. And every time I see someone pretending not to pick his nose, I think of Old Spencer. And that's what's so amazing about it.

“Old Spencer started nodding again. He also started picking his nose. He made out like he was only pinching it, but he was really getting the old thumb right in there.”

"I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all."

"Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."

Review of Gringa by Melissa Hart

2010-02-01T17:20:00.002-05:00

Over at my memoir review column at Bibliobuffet this week, I read and reviewed Gringa, a memoir by Melissa Hart, published by Seal Press. My new goal for this year is to start reading more books by independent publishing companies. I try to request every new memoir I hear about that interests me, but sometimes there are those under-the-radar books that I miss. I enjoyed Gringa so much this week that I can't wait to read more books released by Seal Press and other small publishing houses.

"Committment Issues" at Bibliobuffet

2010-01-22T01:08:00.005-05:00

My book review over at Bibliobuffet this week features Elizabeth Gilbert's new book, "Committed," released this month. Also, thoughts about "Eat, Pray, Love," which, despite the hype, I did end up enjoying. My friend Garrett, book-lover extraordinaire, introduced me to this video, which I absolutely love. It's a video of Gilbert speaking at the TED conference, which I am pretty much obsessed with anyway. But then she talks about the idea that I love the most about art, which is that you are channeling some sort of crazy thing that is not coming from you, but through you. I often say whenever I write fiction or essays (journalism, forget it), I go into a sort of coma and when I look back at what I've written, I'll only remember it as a distant dream. Elizabeth Gilbert completely believes in this, which I love, because it makes writing so much more fun.

Eat, Pray, Hype

2009-12-10T00:52:00.004-05:00

I have a new column up at Bibliobuffet this week about something I love, cooking. The Top Chef season finale is burning a hole in my DVR right now, but I'm going to save it for tomorrow morning, when I'll need some distraction from the massive amount of work I've been putting in this week. The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter and Tears in Paris at the World’s Most Famous Cooking School is about Kathleen Flinn's stint as a student at the world-famous Le Cordon Bleu in France, a dream I've always kept tucked away for myself in the back corner of my mind. Somewhere in all the butchering of pigs and crunching of chicken bones, however, I was disabused of my fantasy and no longer consider cooking school an option for me. It's kind of like how I really enjoy medicine, but could never be a doctor because needles and blood really creep me out.

Speaking of books, my advance copy of Committed, by Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love fame came in the mail from Penguin yesterday. I'm trying to keep my paws off of it until at least the release date, when I'm officially allowed to review it. In preparation for the review I've been reading Eat, Pray, Love, which I'm embarrassed to admit I never read, because in my daily life, I automatically try to avoid things that get too popular. It's the miserable little teenage outcast in me trying to rebel or something. But I have been reading it and I'm about halfway done. So far, I like it and I can understand what all the hype is about. I was surprised to look on Amazon and see that a lot of people really hate the book, giving it 1-star reviews. If they hadn't heard the book was "so good" from all their friends, maybe their miserable little teenage outcast wouldn't have spoken up and slammed the book on Amazon like it was a piece of junk. One reviewer writes, "If I had the money to travel around the world, I'm sure I could have a spiritual awakening, too." Touche, outcast. It is a little irritating to hear about how this woman can run around and not work for a year. But entitled or not, Gilbert put her emotions on the line and wrote an engaging and sensitive book. She's not bragging that she got to do this, she's helping the reader along to establish his own journey, whether it's a change of mindset or location or both. Somehow, I don't think it's fair to give the book one star because the author has money. Or five stars because the book was a bestseller. By getting the book first, I can avoid all of that and actually enjoy what I'm reading.

What the Heck is a TAP?

2009-10-27T14:55:00.007-04:00

The Los Angeles Metro is the single strangest mode of transportation I've ever taken. It's like the MTA's sleazy, inconsistent little sister. You know, the one whose boobs are all over the place. I am an avid rider of the New York subway system. I can tell you which train to take to any area in the city (except the Bronx, but I can get you into the Bronx! Then you're on your own). I have long, heated arguments about whether it's worth it to take the N to Broadway and 30th in Queens after midnight and walk, or cut over to the F, which takes over for the V at night. I'm no stranger to the subway, and all systems operate in pretty much the same way, right? Oh, and then there's Los Angeles, which makes everything a million times more confusing than it should be.

First of all, they use a thing called a TAP card, which I guess is like a Metrocard. You store fares on it, and you can fill it up at the little vending machines in the subway station. But here's the clincher. They don't offer TAP cards in the vending machines! No, you have to go to a store to get them. And then go to the machine to fill it up. And the TAP card costs two dollars, and expires. So, fine, I don't need a TAP card, I'll just print myself a paper ticket and then swipe it-- And then give it to-- Oh wait, that's right, there are no turnstiles on the LA Metro! The entire thing is based on the honor system. So I walk right in, feeling kind of stupid for purchasing a ticket, and sit down on the upholstered seats. Who decided to upholster seats where people will be peeing and throwing food everywhere? You're not allowed to eat in the LA Metro, but I haven't seen any signs about not being allowed to wet your pants.

Then, you have to purchase a new paper ticket every single time you switch lines. I mean, no one is forcing you. You can pretty much just wander around wherever you want down there, but you're supposed to be buying a ticket every time you switch. No transfer, no deal, it's a full fare every time you have to get onto a different train. Trust me, I know, because I'm sitting there, minding my own business and the sheriff steps onto the train. I like how people say "the" sheriff, like we're in an old western cowboy town that only has one sheriff. I'm sure there are like a billion sheriffs here, but still, "the" sheriff comes on the train. "Everyone get your tickets out!" I had a ticket for the red line. I was on the purple line. "Okay..." the (female) sheriff warns, wagging her finger. Like there was a sign ANYWHERE saying I needed to buy a ticket for each line. She proceeded to cuff and remove two non-payers from the train. Apparently they will have to pay a fine. I'm really glad I got away with only a finger wag.

And the last and most lame thing about the LA Metro is that it doesn't stop anywhere good. Unless you want to see bad Marilyn Monroe impersonators and get your wallet taken.

The Dark Secrets of Homelessness Finally Revealed!

2009-09-28T14:18:00.013-04:00

Just kidding. This book really caught my interest because Cadillac Man, the author of this memoir, is from Astoria. I've had many conversations with homeless people in the past and it's always surprising how smart and insightful they are. The person I remember most is an older woman who was talking to herself on the train, dressed in rags. She spoke louder and louder, shouting and wringing her hands. My boyfriend scooted up next to her and asked if everything was okay. I just assumed the woman was crazy or on drugs, and that she would be hostile if we approached her. Instead, she told us how angry she was at her daughter, who wouldn't take her phone calls and was married to a man she didn't approve of. The woman ranted for several minutes, then calmed down and thanked us for listening. For the rest of the train ride, she was quiet and seemed much calmer. Sometimes people just need someone to talk to. Land of Lost Souls is Cadillac Man's method of getting his story out to the world, and I was glad to listen. More about this book in my column this week at bibliobuffet.com.

Sara Barron, Hero of the Day

2009-09-01T18:51:00.011-04:00

I wasn't able to put down Sara Barron's People are Unappealing last week, so naturally I wrote about it on my column at Bibliobuffet this week. I am highly recommending that if you like weird, crazy stuff and are not offended easily, you should read this book immediately. I've heard of Sara Barron through her work at The Moth, my favorite live storytelling event. But I have to say, I was blown over by this book. I thought it was going to be another I Was Told There'd Be Cake, which I really disliked. Another young, over-privileged, under-experienced New York twenty-something that thinks too highly of herself. Sara Barron is entirely the opposite. The woman has no shame! It's so refreshing, I love it!

I'm stranded in the house today with strict orders from the magic TV box not to go outside. According to the news, the fires are too close for comfort and in order to keep from getting a respiratory disorder, I should sit on the couch. Darn, I was planning on running a marathon today and now I can't! Too bad, guess I have to sit here and watch Judge Judy. Speaking of which, I went to see a taping of Family Feud last week, and boy is that set crappy. Only second to the Judge Judy set, which was located in the same studio. I couldn't believe my eyes. It is so small, it looks like an ugly community theater set of a courtroom. So much magic happens in there! Ms. Sheindlin must really shine like a diamond if she can make that crappy room look halfway decent.

Jayanti Tamm's "Cartwheels in a Sari"

2009-08-17T13:05:00.007-04:00

I just reviewed Cartwheels in a Sari by Jayanti Tamm, and my general consensus is that the book is fantastic. My review is currently up at bibliobuffet.com. Cartwheels in a Sari is about Jayanti Tamm's experience not only as a member of the famous Sri Chinmoy Center, but as Sri Chinmoy's "Chosen One" from birth. Ms. Tamm is the first author who has written to me directly to request a review for her book, rather than having her publicist or publishing company do it. I found this to be a great personal touch, because she got my attention and I knew that she cared about the review and about her book getting out there. It's something I'm going to have to remember throughout my own submission process.

I have a few days to myself this week, and I'm going to try to create a writing intensive. I have a quiet house, my computer, and a 200-page draft just waiting to be reworked. Some writers go on retreats, where they are cut off from society for a few days, even a week, so they can finish an essay or book with no distractions. Although I don't have the money or time to do that, and I still have to be working full-time, at least the distractions will be kept at a minimum for the next few days. I'd love to say "no TV," but I don't think that's gonna happen. My goal is to get several hours per day of solid editing done, so I can finally get my last batch of editing out of the way and start submitting.

New Bibliobuffet and Frustrations

2009-08-04T14:09:00.004-04:00

A new review is up at Bibliobuffet today. I really wanted to like The Short Bus, and I guess I enjoyed reading it, but I just felt it could have been much more than it was. The book started off strong, but took a lot of wishy-washy twists and turns that didn't keep me interested. I'm excited for the upcoming review, because I was really excited about the book and thoroughly enjoyed it. Otherwise, I have a massively huge 75-page section of my novel that is ATROCIOUS. I don't even know what I was thinking when I wrote it. Otherwise, the beginning and the end seems strong, but that darn middle is so bad. I'm going to spend the next week or so trying to work this part out, but I think it's going to take a lot of binder clips.

Mooooosic Review

2009-06-29T00:37:00.006-04:00

I've got a music review in this month's issue of Time Out Kids, the great magazine for parents by Time Out New York. If you have kids, buy the album, and if you don't have kids, buy the album anyway, it's really cute. The magazine is available during the month of July at most NYC newsstands.

In other music news, I just discovered Janelle Monae, and I have to say that she is one of the most ridiculously fun live acts I've seen in a long time. Unfortunately, according to her website she has no upcoming appearances, but I hope she makes it to LA sometime soon so I can see her again. She's like a female James Brown/MJ hybrid with a lot of Outkast thrown in. She also does a rad moonwalk, which is pretty appropriate right now.

My New Column!

2009-06-08T02:34:00.008-04:00

Today my first article for my new column called "Memoirama" went up on BiblioBuffet, a wonderful book review website. I'm hoping this will get me to read more books and actually think about them instead of tossing them aside as I'm forced back into the hustle and bustle of daily life.

People are so much slower here than they are in New York. On one hand, it's nice to get a chance to ask someone how their day is. Here is a typical conversation with the cashier if I were to go to the drugstore in New York:

Me: Hi, how are you?
Cashier: (Silence).
Me: Hi, how are you?
Cashier: (Pointing to cash register total).
Me: Okay, uh, debit please.
Cashier: (Handing me my receipt).
Me: Okay, thank you! Have a good day.
Cashier: (Silence).

I used to make it a point to be as nice as possible, especially if the cashier was not answering me. Sometimes I tried to convince myself it was a language barrier thing, and maybe the cashier had just moved here and wasn't sure what I was saying. But if anything, there are more people who speak English as a second language here, and they all seem to be equally as perky as the cashiers who can speak perfect English. Here is a typical conversation with an LA cashier:

Me: Hi, how are you?
Cashier: Great, and you?
Me: I'm great, too.
Cashier: Well, that's wonderful. Did you find everything you needed today?
Me: Yep, got everything.
Cashier: Wonderful. Oh, I love your dress.
Me: Thank you!
Cashier: You're welcome. You have a wonderful day.
Me: You have a wonderful day as well!
Cashier: I will, thank you so much!
Me: You're welcome, see you later.
Cashier: Bye!

I know people in LA are supposed to be fake, but they seem happy, I leave happy, it's a win-win situation. Heading to Santa Barbara tomorrow, which is my first trip outside of the city. I can't wait to see the beautiful scenery.