The distortion of mood upon the same as it ever was
no matter the small mercies of mornings or afternoons
and despite or because of constant memory

Back from the Trenches

My friends at the writing group Who Wants Cake are winning over the world with their good writing group mantras. If you need to be in a writing group, it should be named after dessert. It should include them. They are all goodhearted, smart, hard working. It's terrible to be in a writing group that pegs you for some upstart arro-girl, or is full of fierce wannabes. you want something in the middle. you want people who let their stories be freaks but are themselves decent as they come. decent as dogs.

most dogs.


But if we ever needed a reason to feel proud to not be American as this -- a Fox news reporters gets her yah yahs off by shooting a machine gun off the roof of a bus. It's all just pretend, right.

Ne'er Do Evers Doing Well


Chris Buckridge has a great band. He was starting it when I lived in Carroll Gardens, a hipster obsessive with a sweet streak from Ohio. Brooklyn, of course, that area of Brooklyn, back then, was full of that. It was in full play at the Fall Cafe, where Chris held court while making coffee and peanut butter on tosts. The Fall was where so many of us wrote and didn't write and talked and didn't talk, and there was a strangely greasy feel to everything, but a marvelous scruffy sense of happiness. People could sit there for hours. I sometimes did.

Minnewaska Fire

We could smell it coming over the mountains in High Falls, that dreadful dry and crispy smell, a few thousand acres of wildlands burning in the heat, 30 fire companies trying to contain it. Nothing like this in 50 years. Not since the Minnewaska hotel itself burned, which I remember. It had already closed. My mother bought plates at the closing sale. I have them now, with a little green sketch of one of the rustic little bench houses they'd built all along the lake, up on the Shawungunk rock. There was always a smell there, of pine needles in the heat, of very clear mountain air. I went there often. I don't remember it ever raining. Then it was gone, as they say.

Of course there was a lot more to it than that. Arson was suspected. There was a bitter story with a bitter, charring ending. The land endured, the giant clapboard hotel didn't, the stories, of course, did.

Iconographies of a Personal Disaster




front porch

red roof

irises

blue bathrobe

white bare feet

rickety old table

rain-flooded stream

Flickering cowboy

Quickmuse shows how thinking can happen in poems. How it gets shortcutted into a footbridge over the chasm. How editing is circuitry. It plays back the poem as written at the time. Richard Siken, already my favorite poet, does it in Unhappy Hour. Look for how he gets from pumpkins to flickering cowboy.

Stop Go Stop Go

Working on a new book has its disadvantages. It tends to take advantage of my guilt. Any moment I am standing still a thought comes into my head and if I do not add it to the accumulating pile of information that lives in the new book landfill then it is gone, gone forever.

This morning, I remembered one:

She was sure she had been an Indian in a past life. She didn't feel like explaining it, she told him. But when she was in the woods she just had that feeling.

She imagined telling that to her grandmother, who would just shake her beehive and ask if she wanted more rotisserie chicken. Those giant poultry shears looked like they could cut through a finger. She couldn't get that out of her mind. She shook her head.

What? he said. He thought she was paying attention to him paying attention.

No, she said. I was just remembering something.

From this life, or the one before? he said. Or the one before that? At some point maybe you were, like, a teletype machine. Click click click.

A what? she said. My grandmother had these poultry shears.

[Tara Jane O'Neil]

Has she made herself very clear

Remember: A handpainted Mexican chair hurling across the room. A palomino running across the ring, saddle empty, stirrups flying, seen from the dirt. A black and tan longhaired dog arrowing across the sand. The hermit crabs nipping at her toes.

Tara Jane O'Neil a sweet selfmotor.

Ida was a revelation of harmonies.

Luc read the same smoking section of the smoking piece but it smoked.

The Rosendale Cafe was packed. I had to leave, get back to my dog.

It was a great night.

Fast is Slow

Operative metaphors learned while running through the woods in the dark: fast is slow. If you run too fast, you'll snag your hat on a branch. If you walk instead of run, you can avoid the branches to begin with. But sometimes you just have to run.

Mijami book fair

At the Miami International Book Fair we ate arepas (corn cakes with mozarella). On Sunday I read and therefore fell in love with 2 writers I hadn't known, T. Cooper (Lipshitz 6 or Two Angry Blondes) and Felicia Luna Lemus (Like Son). In the author's lounge we sat around wondering why we'd been put together. They, it was clear, have long been in love with each other. They're a tight pack of alpha two. I sat on the edge of the campfire, edging closer in as we talked.

Some of my book takes place in Russia, and your book is called Russian Lover, T. Cooper speculated. Hm, we all said. But in that way that confluence happens accidentally and is recognized as closer kin than happenstance, we all read sections of our books dealing with assimilation in one way or another. We all push the edge, though differently. We all have dark hair. We all think of photographs as diving boards, as stories. In Felicia's case she's got the subject of the Edward Weston photo on her book cover tattooed on her wrist.

That must be it. The photos, the dark hair.

Whatever it was the audience thought the trio made perfect sense. Book fairs are wonderful. The writers are like the chocolate, the audiences hungry, the end of them--back to the world--can be bittersweet.

Bios of The Ulster Country Three

We are reading this Friday, 11/2 at 7 pm at the American
General Store in West Shokan, New York


Luc Sante's books include Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, Evidence, and The Factory of Facts. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and has written about books, movies, art, photography, and music for many other periodicals. Sante has received a Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Grammy (for album notes). He teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard. His new book, KILL ALL YOUR DARLINGS, is just out with YetiBooks/Verse Chorus Press.


Jana Martin's new volume of her short stories, RUSSIAN LOVER AND OTHER STORIES was published by the great small press YetiBooks/Verse Chorus Press. The book has received much critical acclaim. Her fiction and nonfiction appears in The Mississippi Review, Five Points, Spork, Yeti, the Village Voice, Cosmopolitan, The New York Times, Chronogram and Willow Springs, among others. She also writes regularly about design, architecture, the decorative arts and fashion, most recently on moli.com. Her fiction column, is mink hollow, appeared regularly on sporkpress.com, an awardwinning magazine and website. Her story "Hope" won the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers. A graduate of the MFA program at the University of Arizona, she lives in Ulster County and is working on another book. What you can't see here is that she is wearing those sunglasses over her eyeglasses.


Frank Boyer tends to undercut his own brilliance. He has published poems in a number of little (changing that to small) magazines and anthologies in Wisconsin, New Mexico, and New York. He is a master of the prose poem. He also writes fiction and drama, and does performance work, directing plays and doing his own solo performance/installation works. He teaches art, literature and performance-related subjects at SUNY-New Paltz and at SUNY-Ulster, and lives in Ulster County.

Mea Culpa

Why has it been so long? Isn't that the question you never want to have to publish? Because I was hired to write a blog, and although it's not about books and it's not about Russian Lover or Luc Sante or Vanessa Veselka or what Valerie Martin said today on the Bookshow on WAMC, which I listened to while driving south from Albany after meeting with the ear doctor who performed a tympanoplasty on my ear (and said we had a good result, which from a doctor is like a war whoop of joy, isn't it), and although it's not even about bookcovers or design, or about the wonderful painter Steven Schwartz, aka SAS, whose home and family the fires in Southern Cali missed by the geographic, ember-strewn, ashen equivalent of inches, or about why sometimes I don't want to read fiction and then suddenly run into it somewhere, and sit down and have the longest most delicious conversation ever anyway and wonder why the heck I ever thought of keeping myself hermetically sealed away from all those words, all that craft, all that wild writer's brain stewing and tangling and untangling the messy data of our hearts, it still requires a certain kind of writerly discipline and impulse.

That is why.


[technoviking]

But the wordy world keeps turning.

Darlin Neal curated the latest issue of The Mississippi Review online: The Hyperextended Family. There are great stories here, including a story by Claudia Smith, "Jennies," that has this great line: "She likes me to make the dolls alive." My story, "Painter," really a trio, a 3-part blue fugue of before and after, is in there too. Honored to be in such good company. Kind of a way of closing a long and wobbly circle that started in about 1984, when I worked with Mary Robison, who counted among her best friends "Rickle," who turned out to be Richard Barthelme, who is the editor of the Mississippi Review.