Fossil 23 by yours truly was just released on Black Lodge Press. Copies are $14 ($12 + $2 shipping in the US; if overseas I'll have to check with the local post). Send me an email.
In the early 1990s, I shared a brief correspondence with Allen Ginsberg. I was homeless at the time and longed to be a writer. I had moved to the Big Sur region of California following the death of Richard Brautigan (I was driven by the reckless lifestyle in A Confederate General from Big Sur), and became connected with Allan through a piece I had published in Coffeehouse Poets' Quarterly. He hated the piece and offered suggestions out of kindness. One suggestion was to come and study with him at Naropa University (then Naropa Institute).
At the time, I was living at the local campground and on the school lawn and had my mail delivered to a friend's house in Cambria. The prospect of attending class with Allen was everything I ever wanted. Due largely to his encouragement, I decided to return to school and make my way to Naropa.
Flash forward a couple of years to 1994. My college English instructor, Elissa Wagner, tried to publish an essay of mine in the new revision of New Worlds of Literature (Norton). My piece was a satirical critique of the poem “I Am A Cowboy In The Boat of Ra†by Ishmael Reed. Knowing that my piece was about to be published I panicked. Each day I made my way to the library or the local bookstore and spent hours reading books on Egyptian history, just to be sure that my essay was sound. What I found was extremely discouraging: each book I read contradicted the last. I also had several telephone conversations with Ishmael Reed at the time and his well-reasoned questions about my perspective put me on ice.
I asked Elissa to put the project on hold while I transferred to UC Berkeley (things were looking up) to take courses in Egyptology. A few years later I was completely obsessed with Egyptian clocks and spend all of my time in the Egyptology department. Elissa and I lost touch, but I ran into Ishmael Reed quite often and continued the dialog.
After college I spent some time living in Egypt, where I again fell in love with writing. Rather than perform the research I had gone there to do, I spent my days reading Paul Bowles and Ben Okri and writing in my journal.
Eventually I made my way to Naropa and graduated just two years ago (2005) with a MFA in Creative Writing. Surrounded by other people who think and talk and dream about writing was absolute bliss. Surrounded by other writers the world suddenly felt right. My peers and I stayed up all night long writing and talking about stories and plots and strategies. Eventually, I was awarded a semester long teaching position and was asked back in the summer of 2005 to teach an undergraduate workshop.
Not only was I fortunate to have as my peer such writers as Kevin Kilroy, Jefferson Navicky, Emily Crocker, Ben Hersey, Michael Jones, J.D., Luis Valadez, but I had the chance to study with some of my personal literary heroes: Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Anne Waldman, Junior Burke, Laird Hunt, Bhanu Kapil, Brian Evenson, Rebecca Brown, Samuel Delany, and many others.
I now teach writing and literature in the local Jr. College circuit and hope to find full time work (soon) teaching creative writing at a small liberal university. My dream is to teach writing at Naropa, but for some reason this does not seem to be working out as I had anticipated.
The last three years I have been working on my novel The Bologna Generation, an onyx-black comedy about a difficult blue collar father raising a middle class son in the suburbs of California.
My stories have appeared in Bombay Gin, American Drivel Review, Hot Whiskey, Matter, The Cafe Review, Pablo Lennis, Entelechy, The Four Quarter Review, Ellipsis, and Pinstripe Fedora, among others.
My book American Dust is due out in 2007 on Kenneth Goldsmith's Unpublishable Texts, and my book Fossil 23 will be out in spring 2007 by Black Lodge Press .
Also see:
Hips For Erect Walking
International Exchange For Poetic Invention
