JI: We have physically met–as far as I can remember–one time: at the Literature Party at AWP in Chicago this year. During our brief conversation we talked mainly about our children, as we both have babies around the same age. So, not only are you a devoted father/writer, but you’re fiction editor at The Good Men Project, where, under their “About Us” page it says Continue Reading
La Primavera
Ultimately, we end up turning memories into our own images. Of course, it really happened so it feels very real. But…say I construct the future, as though I’m making a film about it. As I imagine all kinds of situations, I think what I create would feel a lot more real than some memory. (Iseya, in After Life by Hirokazu Koreeda)
Melissa is telling me that I don’t have HBO even though I do. Continue Reading
When It Was Funky
In college I spent most of my time skipping class in a coffee shop set up in an old tobacco warehouse surrounded by bored liberal arts students and the Most Arrested Man in America. The roof leaked. The jukebox blasted George Clinton and Clarence Carter. Vagrants killed hours with secondhand paperbacks and board games. Continue Reading
In Hot Pursuit of the Next American Word Wizard
“One mustn’t criticize other people on grounds where he can’t stand perpendicular himself.”
- Mark Twain
I am attracted to American Idol each week not for the sinful pleasure and uncertainty of what will spring forth from rock marionette Steven Tyler’s epic lips. Nor am I riveted by the breathless voluptuousness of Jennifer Lopez (though she is quite ravishing). Continue Reading
An Interview with Kevin Sampsell
Jamie Iredell: You work as an editor, at a bookstore, and as a writer. When do you start getting sick of books?
Kevin Sampsell: The problem isn’t getting sick of books, it’s not having enough time to read all the books that surround me every day. So it’s more like being frustrated. Writers: Stop making so many cool books! Continue Reading
Finding My Inner Bastard
There are two types of people in the world. Those who will angrily send back a Reuben sandwich because it came open-faced and those who will doctor the soggy pieces of bread into a closed sandwich so as to not make any waves. My friend Phil is definitely the former, berating a waiter for delivering the sandwich that he had in fact ordered and belittling the server Continue Reading
Boo Radley’s Back Pages
May 15, 1856: The would-be birthday of American author L. Frank Baum, the wonderful wizard behind Oz.
"I am convinced that the only people worthy of consideration in this world are the unusual ones. For the common folks are like the leaves of a tree, and live and die unnoticed.”
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