Pittsburgh is the kind of city where we have poems in the paper. That’s right. Poems. In a newspaper. Thanks to Greg Victor and The Pittsburgh Post Gazette for running some of mine here.
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When I did this interview with the wonderful Nina Mohan from City of Asylum’s SAMPSONIA WAY magazine, I joked that she wouldn’t be able to quote me. But she did quote me. In fact, she let me be all trash-mouthy in the headline. Love her and Henry Reese and all the wonderful people at City of Asylum who believe in freedom of speech and freedom freedom freedom. These folks are changing the world by giving endangered writers shelter and a home here in Pittsburgh. IN PITTSBURGH, WE HAVE A VERY STRONG SENSE OF NO BULLSHIT.
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I love Ernest Hemingway. I can’t help it. I read THE SUN ALSO RISES every summer. Have for the past 25 years or so. I told NPR’s Josh Raulerson all about it — one true sentence at a time — on his show, Speaking Volumes. You can listen in here.
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It’s fun to talk about how a poem happens. Just ask Brian Brodeur, who runs a website called just that. Here’s what I told him about my poem, “Working the Red Eye, Pittsburgh to Vegas.”
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Dan Cafaro is doing some amazing things at Atticus Press and Review. He publishes cutting-edge books (check out The Terrifying, Terrific, Tantalizing Tall Tale of Tommy Twice by Nathan Leslie, for instance) and is the kind of publisher writers dream of because… wait for it… wait for it… he cares. Really. He cares (!) about his writers and about getting work he believes in out in the world. He even made matchbooks with his authors pics on them for last year’s AWP. I heard there was also pie at the Atticus table, but I didn’t get there in time. How hot is that? Pie. Matchbooks. A publisher who cares. I feel lucky to have been published a few times in Atticus Review. Here’s my most recent piece, You Never Can Tell About People. It’s an excerpt from my new manuscript-in-progress, VIRTUAL MOTHER — a flash nonfiction book about adoption, family, and reality vs. virtual-ity.
