Category: articles
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Where do your ideas come from?
When someone asks me “where do your ideas come from?” I often experience this high-functioning autistic shut down I experience with many questions. I am rather obsessed with speaking to the question someone’s asking. Dinosaur that I am becoming, my mind works almost in complete opposition to the way that most moderns think. “Where do…
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Disrespect Hard Copies of My Books, Please
Recently someone I care for witnessed their young child snatch this copy of Little Women I had on hand — they took it away from this child, reasoning that this child might disrespect hard copies of my books. My response, immediately, was, “It’s really okay.” This person said, “He’ll tear it.” I said, “That’s okay…
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Nebula Award Winners
Nebula Award winners are a bit difficult to find gathered all in one post on the SFWA site, no offense to them. If you go to the SFWA site — for whom I remain obviously grateful — it’s several extra clicks to get to the proper year, which makes it rather difficult to search by author. I…
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Braver Than You Think
When I sat down to write this reflection on the book Braver Than You Think by Maggie Downs, it seemed to me a really weird thing to do. I almost never review books on the site anymore and I’m not really reviewing one now. I almost never — in a decade of doing this stuff — do…
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Book Agents Near Me
Fourteen years ago in 2008, I searched for book agents near me and found out two things: It’s rather hard to go door to door (sorry, Jennifer DeChiara, but luckily for both of us I never got past your doorman). They’re not necessarily receptive to folks just saying, “Here’s my property, where’s my money?” It’s…
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Bad Intellectual: The Houellebecqian Case of Catherine Perez-Shakdam
Alors, les Français sont en train de flatter l’islam bien.Sadegh Hedayat Once, one of the Iranian politicians in the Parliament of Iran during his speech accounted a brief conversation with arteshbod Hossein Fardoust, some years after 1979. Fardoust was a friend of Shah and one of the most influential figures of SAVAK—in the last meeting…
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Poezak : a Manifesto
Poetry has been afflicted with meaning for too long. Certainly, there have been stabs at meaninglessness—dada, language poetry, flarf—but without a sustaining podium, without a venue, these movements have flared and died like matches struck and cupped in the general dark of meaningfulness. But the podium has been awaiting us, brightly lit and stark. The…
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Before Living in NYC series
Often I divert conversations from questions about living in NYC because even mentioning living here, you get judged. Conservatives outside NYC judge you as a liberal elitist. Liberal elitists judge you as a poser conservative who didn’t grow up here. NYC conservatives judge you as not war-hardened enough and liberals outside the city judge you…
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Sunset Park shooting and the 500 Eggs
As some of you know, living in the neighborhood through the Sunset Park shooting was tricky to navigate — to say the least. Also hard. 10 neighbors shot from 33 rounds a few houses away from Bobby Constantino whom I interviewed for this piece on gun violence. For years, family and acquaintances and some close…
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Ether
I go with my wings to the edge of the earth, I deliberate faith and the breaking of eggs. Oh, oh, I moved here against the vacuum of your wanting for love; I’m continentally-far with these wide- swooping crows. You’re the edge of the earth falling away from my toes. You’re the turquoise planes of…
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Absence
The air conditioner disturbs the birds, the church bells; they think these things are calling to them. Does this mean anything to you, as you mourn this or that, as big rain falls from a blue sky? Probably not in your lifetime will you conceive of such magnanimous panic—searching the white skies over, over for…
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Art in Heartache
Of all the many waves curling onward in the river, of all the green things growing upward from the earth, I won’t say I know you, I won’t say I miss you, I won’t say I I I at all in this poem. What space then for the study of the shape of the boats,…