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.