Getting Closer to Fine (via The Writing Spider)

Science has supposedly told us that scent is the most powerful memory trigger humans have. There are times, indeed, that I've caught a whiff of my grandmother's apartment – fresh Maine air tinged with pine, a little bit of Comet cleaner, and her favorite Jean Nate body splash – despite the fact that her apartment was in Bangor and I live in Louisville and she passed on 25 years ago. Or I've been stopped short by the odor of what I swear is my pre … Read More

via The Writing Spider

Memoirs of Meanness: Review by Marc Schuster

As its title suggests, Memoirs of Meanness, is a collection of first-person essays that explore bullying from a number of different angles. Though it would be easy to cite the 2004 film Mean Girls (and the book upon which it was based, Queen Bees and Wannabes) as an inspiration for this volume, Memoirs actually takes its investigation a step further by allowing those most involved in the phenomenon to speak their own minds on the subject; a little over two-dozen essayists contributed to the project, each bringing a fresh perspective to the issue. What’s especially interesting, moreover, is that the book doesn’t just examine bullying from the victim’s perspective. In many instances, the bully speaks up, too, with reflections on what motivates bullies and also how to deal with the problem.

Given the varied perspectives on the subject, it should come as no surprise that this collection of essays offers no easy answers. Among the more disconcerting of the memoirs is a piece by a single mother struggling to rein in her violent five-year-old son. As the piece concludes, it’s more than apparent that the child is well on his way to terrorizing everyone he meets, which leaves the reader in the helpless position of wondering what to do about the problem. This apparent sense of helplessness is reinforced later in the book when another writer glimpses an exchange between a man and woman that borders on domestic abuse. As the writer confesses to doing nothing when faced with the situation, it’s impossible to blame him, as many readers will likely have been in his shoes at one time or another.

Ultimately, though, the sense of helplessness inherent in several of the book’s essays gives way to a more hopeful vision. Indeed, the fact that this book exists at all suggests that healthy dialogue can lead would-be bullies (at least the less extreme cases) to more constructive means of addressing their existential angst. Along these lines, a series of discussion questions at the end of the book can lead to a productive discussion of bullying. Accessible without ever oversimplifying the issue, Memoirs of Meanness makes an excellent tool for beginning a constructive dialogue on issues surrounding bullying at any stage of life.
For more reviews of books from independent presses, visit Small Press Reviews.

The Dissemblers (via Small Press Reviews)

Given my recent forays in the fine(-ish) arts, I found Liza Campbell’s The Dissemblers to be doubly intriguing. Not only is the novel beautifully written, but it also offers a loving meditation on (among other things) the nature of art and its place in our world. The narrative focuses on a young artist named Ivy Wilkes who ditches her past to seek her true path in Georgia O’Keefe’s New Mexico. Here, she takes a job in a museum gift shop, falls in … Read More

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Writing: Find the Time or Don’t (via Whatever)

Here’s a great piece by author John Scalzi…

Over the last couple of months I've gotten a fair number of letters from aspiring writers who want to write but find themselves plagued by the vicissitudes of the day, i.e., they've got jobs, and they're tiring, and when they come home they just want to collapse in front of the TV/spend time with family/blow up anthills in the backyard/whatever. And so they want to know two things: One, how I keep inspired to write; two, how one manages to find t … Read More

via Whatever

Spiking the Sucker Punch – Review by Marc Schuster

“Clowns,” the first poem of Robbie Q. Telfer’s Spiking the Sucker Punch, sets up the major tension that runs throughout this collection of poetry and underscores something that most adults know but frequently forget: tragedy and comedy are two sides of the same whoopee cushion. In “Clowns,” this notion takes shape in a series of observations about the tragic lives (and deaths) of stand-up comedians like Phil Hartman and Bill Hicks, but the biggest joke of all, Telfer reports, is that it’s only human nature to go on (and on, and on, and on) despite all of the heartache: as a race, we are nothing if not tenacious.

Telfer’s love for comedy is apparent throughout the volume. His poems have titles like “Nine Portraits of a Bad Crook,” “Douchebag, or Pseudo-Feminist Hippie Douchebag,” and “My anus has a bucktoothed garden,” and they cover a wide range of issue, like how to avoid being raped by cavemen and using glow worms to teach children about Satan. What really makes his work so engaging, however, is that Telfer is more than just a jester — he’s a smart jester who speaks in the staccato rhythms of the postmodern, Wikipedia-informed world. He takes the trivia that we live and breathe and call a culture and weaves it into something new, so that when he calls you a douchebag, he’s also ready to let you know exactly what being a douchebag entails, historical context and all.

Given Telfer’s comedic bent, it’s not surprising that his collection is published by Write Bloody, a press that specializes in work by “tour-savvy” authors. Their poets are also performers, and so it’s only natural that Spiking the Sucker Punch reads at times like a transcript from a Lenny Bruce rant, while his performances, based on what I’ve seen on YouTube, are reminiscent of David Byrne:

All told, Spiking the Sucker Punch reveals Telfer as a smart, funny poet who understands, above all, that laughs never come cheap.

To read more reviews of books from small and independent presses, visit Small Press Reviews.