Back to Jack, A Poem, Drawing Challenge Blog

We're so busy around these parts lately, I've hardly been able to make time for this enterprise. Our annual Jack Kerouac memorial reading is coming up, on October 21, so we're full steam ahead on rehearsals, locking down the script, getting a venue lined up, and chasing down performers. Back to Jack is a literary tradition in Toledo, going back to 1984. The original 'Jacks', five poets and musicians who performed and caroused together, took Back to Jack to Lowell, MA, and Ontario, I believe, and even performed in front of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady's widow. They also performed all over town, in bars, sandwich shops, and the Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Toledo.

Fairy Tales, Wandering in the Woods, Writing a Novel

I've been thinking a lot about fairy tales lately, mostly because I'm trying to write one, a fairy tale, something modern and ancient at the same time, inspired by Robert Graves and Neil Gaiman, John Crowley and C.J. Cherryh. There are rules, you know. Games and Riddles, balances struck, a tally of your misdeeds, a record of your mortal ignorance. An example of mortal ignorance: there are a million ways to write the word 'fairy', and all of them mean the realm of Fairy, and the individual creatures which are known as fairies, who live in the realm of Fairy. Oy. And in the first draft writing of this blog I've used many versions of the word. Which, you know, may be the right way to do it, since the realm and its citizens have been described as eternally changing and nearly impossible to catalog and comprehend. I'll do my best here to maintain the use of one version, the one spelled like this: F A I R Y.

There Is So Much To Learn: The Michelle Williams Interview

Here is an interview I did with the gifted and lovely Michelle Williams. It was supposed to run in the First Anniversary issue of SPLAT, which is currently on hiatus. For the time being I'll be supporting the poetry interview aspect of the magazine with this blog. I had a few fun interviews in progress and will finish them here.

Please enjoy this interview, and please, share your opinions and impressions with me!

First post, SPLAT Art Magazine on hiatus, new poetry interviews

A little over a year ago, my friend Ryan Warner and I started collaborating on an 'underground' arts magazine called SPLAT. It's a great little labor of love/vanity project that we worked really hard on and are very proud of. But around May, which would have been the magazine's first anniversary, the labor aspect overtook the love aspect of putting together an new issue every couple of months. Ryan started looking for new jobs, my son turned two and went a little terrible on us, and so we found our obligations to daily life overwhelming our devotion to the magazine, and we went on hiatus. For the summer only, we're promising ourselves.

And I hope that's true because I loved working on a magazine. Most of my writing life I've made poems or written critical papers about poems and poets, so it was a refreshing change of pace to do some thing journalistic  interviewing poets and organizing our conversation into cohesive, personal narratives about poetry, art, and life in general. In fact, I've been missing the thoughtful, creative conversations I had with Toledo's poets, and find myself thinking a lot about the poets I didn't get to talk to yet. So, while SPLAT is on its hopefully brief hiatus, I'm going to continue the interview series I started a little more than a year ago here, at this blog. I'll post links to old interview in previous issues SPLAT, and maybe catch up with a few poets I've already talked to. Maybe someone has a new chapbook or complete collection they'd like to promote, or maybe there's a new magazine accepting submissions. I'll try to make this a destination for poets and poetry lovers of all types. I'd like to also share book reviews, maybe some recipes, drawings, and maybe some "What I've been up to" journal type entries. We'll see how things play out. I hope you'll visit often.

In the meantime, I have an interview to post that was supposed to be, and still might be, in the latest issue of SPLAT, whenever it comes out, and I'm going to post that ASAP. I just have to work out some details with Ryan. While you're waiting, here's a link to the interview I did with Matt Sradeja: http://issuu.com/splatartmagazine/docs/splatartmagazine.nov.dec.2011