I’ve started posting occasionally on Substack with a newsletter I’ve dubbed “The Slush Pile.” If you want a direct line to my random thoughts on writing, literature, music, and everything in between, please follow along!
“Snoozer” in Pithead Chapel
I’m thrilled to announce that my short story “Snoozer” is featured in the February 2019 issue of Pithead Chapel! A huge thanks to everyone at Pithead Chapel for a great editorial experience, and for putting together a fantastic issue.
Read the story below.
Barrelhouse Nominates “The Fleet” for Pushcart Prize
The folks at Barrelhouse have nominated “The Fleet,” which appeared in issue 18, for the 2018 Pushcart Prize! I’m thrilled to be on this list with such talented writers. See the full list of nominees below, and check out Barrelhouse to read them all!
Photographic Evidence of My Novel in Progress
All of those pages need to be revised, but I promise they are not blank.
“The Fleet” in Barrelhouse
My short story “The Fleet” will appear in the upcoming 18th issue of Barrelhouse! You can pre-order it at the link below.
https://www.barrelhousemag.com/shopone/issue-18
A huge thanks to everyone at Barrelhouse for publishing this piece! I am nowhere near cool enough to be in this mag.
“Scarecrow Divining” in Grist Journal
My latest short story “Scarecrow Divining” is now available in Grist Journal Issue 11! Check it out below.
http://gristjournal.com/current-issue/
Thanks to all the folks at Grist for publishing this piece, and for being so great to work with. I can’t wait to read the full issue!
Writing Exercise: The Chair on the Playground
I saw a chair on a playground and it made me think of writing.
Not about the chair itself – this isn’t Ode to a Playground Chair – but about the circumstances that once surrounded it. My wife and I came upon it in a Tennessee December, and we could only guess at how long it had been there. It somehow managed to appear beaten up – its leather torn, its arms missing, its legs tilted unsteadily in the grass – while also seeming fresh, as though someone had left it there just hours before we found it.
Maybe You’ll Be President: Listening to Hail to the Thief in 2017 (Part 2)
In part one of my track-by-track revisiting of Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief, things got pretty dystopian pretty quickly. This is an album about dread, after all, and its opening tracks leave little room for the real-life hope that has reared its head in the face of the new administration. We’ve seen record protests, spiking newspaper subscriptions, confrontational Republican town halls, jammed Congressional phone lines, and a sense of activation among concerned citizens that I have never witnessed before. Pressure from the people and the press is yielding tangible results. This is encouraging.
But.
When I stick this disk into my CD player, I’m not looking to feel more optimistic about the state of the world; Radiohead’s music is perfect for wallowing in its darkness and articulating its myriad anxieties. So let’s go deeper into the thicket and see what we find. Read more…
Music Has Replaced the Silence
“Now she’s beginning to sculpt her own accretion disk, her own solar system, setting the centripetal speed and pushing all the particles in and out with her pointer…”
January has April Showers: Listening to Hail to the Thief in 2017 (Part 1)
Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief will always be seen as an anti-Bush album. Released in 2003 right around the start of the Iraq war, the album turned the paranoia of the War on Terror back onto the administration driving it, and even its kleptocratic title is an unsubtle reference to George W. Bush’s election victory despite losing the popular vote. Add in anxious lines about “the loonies taking over,” and a father-to-son passing of the torch moment like “maybe you’ll be president,” and it’s clear that Yorke had the 43rd president in mind when he penned at least some of these lyrics, despite some of them being written before the war in Iraq even started.