The Audio Series: Matt Rowan

Our audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen." is an incredibly special one for us. Hatched in a NYC club during BEA week, this feature requires more work of the author than any of the ones that have come before. And that makes it all the more sweeter when you see, or rather, hear them read excerpts from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.


Today, Matt Rowan reads a few short stories from his collection Why God Why, which released this year by Love Symbol Press. Matt Rowan is a writer and editor living in Chicago, IL. He co-edits Untoward Magazine and assists with The Anthology of Chicago. His work can be found in Artifice, SmokeLong Quarterly, Alice Blue Review and Cloud Rodeo, among others.

Click the soundcloud files below to experience Why God Why as read by Matt Rowan:

The word on Why God Why:

Why God Why is a collection of bizarre, hilarious, occasionally touching and occasionally creepy flash fiction pieces.

"Matt Rowan writes as if he'd spent the past several years living inside a Russell Edson poem. Hands come from the sky to offer uninterpretable signs, superheroes with terrible powers make peace with themselves, public speakers demonstrate their insect-enlarging guns (necessary for world peace!) or declare that we must defeat the menace of the bats by becoming bats ourselves. The stories move with so much weird energy that we get the impression that, rather than ending, we are watching them shake themselves apart, or explode." - James Tadd Adcox, author of The Map of the System of Human Knowledge
*lifted with love from goodreads

CCLaP; Sad Robot Stories

It's time for another celebration! 

Another CCLaP book is born and I am so happy to share it with you!

Today, Mason Johnson's Sad Robot Stories is released into the world for the first time ever as an honest-to-goodness novella, and I cannot tell you how excited I am about it. A long while ago, I stumbled across Mason and the original self published, crayon illustrated, and totally self-navigable version of this book. I dug on it super hard core then, and I have to tell you, I didn't think it was possible, but I love it one hundred times more now that CCLaP got their hands all in it (although I do really miss those adorably horrendous illustrations!).

The general consensus was that the apocalypse had made everything considerably quieter.

Robot disagreed.

It tells the story of Robot, who is one of millions of androids on an Earth that recently saw the extinction of human life. While Robot's mechanical brothers and sisters seem happy, Robot finds himself lost and missing the only friend he had, a human named Mike whose family accepted Robot as a piece of their personal puzzle. Without both the mistakes and the capacity for miracles that define human civilization, is civilization even worth having? Explore this question in the hilarious yet heartbreaking full-length debut of popular Chicago performer Mason Johnson. A Kurt Vonnegut for the 21st century, his answers are simultaneously droll, surprising and touching, and will make you rethink the limits of what a storyteller can accomplish within science fiction. 

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Early reviewers were falling in love with Robot, check it out:

Gaspers Block  says “Sad Robot Stories … reads more like fable and allegory than campy science fiction. It may playfully explore a host of complex, timely issues, such as the mechanization of the workforce, gender nonconformity, and the looming threat of extinction... at its core it's about the magic of storytelling, a celebration of how the best stories, the "honest" stories, can make us feel whole, sustain us, connect us, and give us hope--even in our darkest hour.”

Beach Sloth wants you to know that “Mason Johnson understands what it means to be human... ‘Sad Robot Stories’ is a story about faith, love, and finding one’s inner humanity.”

Digital Sextant calls it “ ...a beautiful little gem...”

Silent Lucidity admits that “Not since R. Daneel Olivaw, first introduced in Asimov’s The Caves of Steel, have I fallen in love with a robot...”

Chicago Literati made this comparison “If David Lynch were to develop a dystopian retelling of Pinocchio, it would be like Mason Johnson’s Sad Robot Stories.”

Love at First Book laughed and cried... “The book opens up with (a) how-can-you-not-be-hooked first line..”

And goodreads users Paula Swafford says “Johnson’s description of Robot’s siblings in the post-catastrophe world was entertaining.” and Dr. Lamb calls it “..a story about growth and about what it means to be a human...”

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Just in case these amazing reviews don't convince you, we were lucky enough to have the following websites post excerpts. You know, so you could read the awesome for yourself:

Little Fiction excerpts Cats and creates this awesome fan art poster

and 

This Blog Will Save Your Life excerpts Dream

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I've really enjoyed pitching around Sad Robot Stories for a variety of reasons. It's the best apocalypse-novella-with-heart I've ever read, it's got one of the coolest and saddest robots I've ever met, and its author is made of awesome-sauce. Mason makes everything funner. (Yes I just used a non-word. Shuddup.) If you are anywhere near the Chicago area this month, you should totally find your way to one of his readings. And if you do, be sure to tell me about it, and know that I will be most jealous of you!

You can now purchase a gorgeous, hand-made hard cover edition of Sad Robot Stories on CCLaP's website. 

What are you waiting for? Go and get it now. You can thank me later! 

Indie Spotlight: Claudia Zuluaga

It's always fascinating to hear about the inspiration behind a book, whether the story was inspired by an author's personal past, a favorite book, a song they loved, or something spun out of their own imagination. 

Today, author Claudia Zuluaga shares the inspiration behind her book Fort Starlight, and explains why she tends to write about characters who find themselves isolated, no matter if that isolation is physical or mental...

Fort Starlight / Engine Books, September 2013

“Broke and stranded in a half-finished tract house in a swamp, Ida Overdorff discovers the strange community around her—a millionaire living in a tree house, two feral child thieves. Ida clings to her dream of returning to New York while weathering storms both meteorological and emotional, and comes to understand that nobody’s luck—even hers—is all bad.”

Just before my sixteenth birthday, my parents moved, taking my younger sister and me from a suburb of New York to a town in South Florida. Our five older siblings were old enough that they didn’t need to live at home, so we left them behind. Years before, my parents had invested in a piece of land with some money they had somehow scraped together. The South Florida town was expanding into the wilderness, and though the land wasn’t worth much, it was enough that they’d been able to trade it toward the cost of a villa in a new development.

It wasn’t so much of a culture shock as a ‘no culture’ shock, as we moved in the middle of the summer to a community that only had a few inhabitants.  It was a relief when school started, but it didn’t change the fact that everything was so spread apart. And quiet. I was afraid of the silence, of all that it made me feel. I wasn’t yet formed; I didn’t know who I was. The open sky and the silence, silence, silence didn’t help me to see who I could be. I was overwhelmed by the religiosity, the heat, the long stretches of emptiness that made me fear the worst about myself and my future, and there was nothing to distract or dilute. College wasn’t my family culture, so that never seemed an option. I plotted my escape to parts more populous, thinking I would start my life when that happened.  And I did escape and did start a life.

The conviction that I had to leave in order to make a life for myself was based on an illusion, of course, because you can’t really get away from yourself. By leaving and choosing to be around lots of people, I wasn’t evolving any faster; I merely distracted myself with noise. 

In Fort Starlight, Ida Overdorff is alone and isolated from other people, from civilized comforts, and from her own aspirations. She is hot and dirty and afraid, and the worst thoughts she has about herself seem to manifest as her only companions in the unfinished house where she manages to survive. She is flawed in what feel like particularly hopeless ways. She never knew how she might fit into the world, and when she arrives in Fort Starlight, the world, as she knows it, vanishes.  It is just her and humidity and sun and wild animals. There isn’t even a mirror. In this isolation, she can either self-destruct or turn this predicament into an opportunity to finally define herself. 

The intensity of her isolation, really being stuck with her rawest self, finally moves Ida from self-pity to more productive thoughts. And Ida soon discovers that, despite first appearances, she is not all alone in Fort Starlight. She is, in fact, part of a tiny community, and they are all connected through their individual struggles.

I always knew that I’d write about the town as I first saw it and felt it. It was so haunting: the scattered houses in various stages of construction, the specter of a place that does not yet exist.  Of course, it is no longer that place. I wish I could see it again, just as it was, to experience the place as the mother/writer/teacher that I am now.

My fictional characters are always isolated, literally or figuratively. I believe so completely in the power of that moment when you have to face the very thing you want to avoid, and putting my people into those dangerous moments is probably why I write fiction in the first place.

Claudia Zuluaga was born in White Plains, NY, grew up both there and Port St. Lucie, Florida, and now lives in New Jersey.  Her fiction has appeared in Narrative Magazine, JMWW, and Lost Magazine, and was included in Dzanc Books' Best of the Web series. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories. Claudia is a full time Lecturer in the English department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.

Kathe Koja's Would You Rather

Bored with the same old fashioned author interviews you see all around the blogosphere? Well, TNBBC's newest series is a fun, new, literary spin on the ole Would You Rather game. Get to know the authors we love to read in ways no other interviewer has. I've asked them to pick sides against the same 20 odd bookish scenarios. And just to spice it up a bit, each author gets to ask their own Would You Rather question to the author who appears after them....

Kathe Koja's 

Would You Rather

photo by Rick Lieder

Would you rather write an entire book with your feet or with your tongue?

Tongue = verbal.

Would you rather have one giant bestseller or a long string of moderate sellers?

Strings last longer than giants do.

Would you rather be a well known author now or be considered a literary genius after you’re dead?

Rather the work be known now AND remembered. The author part is nice but not necessary.

Would you rather write a book without using conjunctions or have every sentence of your book begin with one?

The latter, absolutely.

Would you rather have every word of your favorite novel tattooed on your skin or always playing as an audio in the background for the rest of your life?

Skin, because skin changes, scars might alter the text, surgeries edit, etc. Background noise = hell.

Would you rather write a book you truly believe in and have no one read it or write a crappy book that comprises everything you believe in and have it become an overnight success?

Ewwww. Belief please!

Would you rather write a plot twist you hated or write a character you hated?

I can’t hate my characters and write about them, they’d become cardboard figures without any feeling or depth. I have indeed written plot twists I “hated” in the sense that, oh, I wish this wasn’t going to happen to you, Mr. Character, but that’s the way the story’s going, so what must be must be. Sometimes these events surprise me too.

Would you rather use your skin as paper or your blood as ink?

Blood. Heartfelt.

Would you rather become a character in your novel or have your characters escape the page and reenact the novel in real life?

Oh, the latter please! Is this possible? Can we do it with other people’s books too!?

Would you rather write without using punctuation and capitalization or without using words that contained the letter E?

Love the E. Goodbye, semicolons.

Would you rather have schools teach your book or ban your book?

Depends on the school.

Would you rather be forced to listen to Ayn Rand bloviate for an hour or be hit on by an angry Dylan Thomas?

Dylan all the way.

Would you rather be reduced to speaking only in haiku or be capable of only writing in haiku?

Five syllables is

A hindrance, but in books it

Would hurt so much more.

Would you rather be stuck on an island with only the 50 Shades Series or one that was written in a language you couldn't read?

Language that I couldn't read - I'd have plenty of time to puzzle it out, and leave the island (if I left!) in better linguistic shape than I landed.

Would you rather critics rip your book apart publically or never talk about it at all?

It’s always nice to be noticed.

Would you rather have everything you think automatically appear on your Twitter feed or have a voice in your head narrate your every move?

Both are hellish. Abstain!

Would you rather give up your computer or pens and paper?

Oh, so complementary! A sad question. In the end, paper and pencils win for ease of operation.

Would you rather write an entire novel standing on your tippy-toes or laying down flat on your back?

Toes.

Would you rather read naked in front of a packed room or have no one show up to your reading?

Depends what I was reading.

Would you rather read a book that is written poorly but has an excellent story, or read one with weak content but is written well? 

Well-written all the way. can’t read the other kind, like eating gravel ice cream, keep cracking teeth, gagging, etc.

And here is Kathe's response to the question Kelly Davio asked her last week:

Would you rather have to use profanity on every page of your book, or nowhere in your book?

 Every.

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Check back next week to see what Collin Kelley would rather

 and see her answer to Kathe's question:

Would you rather read all day or write all day?

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Kathe Koja is a writer and event creator/producer based in Detroit. Her fifteenth novel, THE MERCURY WALTZ, sequel to the critically-acclaimed UNDER THE POPPY, is scheduled for fall 2013, as is a short fiction collection, GONE TO EXTREMES. UNDER THE POPPY's immersive theatrical performance premiered earlier this year. 

Indie Book Buzz: Arsenal Pulp

We are knee deep in Indie Book Buzz here at TNBBC. Over the next few weeks, we will be inviting members of the small press publishing houses to share which of their upcoming releases they are most excited about!

This week's picks come from Missi Smith, 

Assistant Publicist at 45^th Parallel Communications.

The Trial of Pope Bendict:  Joseph Ratzinger and the Vatican’s Assault on Reason, Compassion, and Human Dignity
by Daniel Gawthrop

Published by Arsenal Pulp Press

What is it about?  The Trial of Pope Benedict is an extensively researched work of a conscientious objector who has lapsed from the Catholic Church – but remains culturally tied to many of the Catholic traditions that informed his early years.  Now, an openly gay atheist, author Daniel Gawthrop examines Joseph Ratzinger’s career not long after the Pope’s resignation made history in the Catholic Church.   Gawthrop crafts a necessary and powerful critique of the most powerful religious institution in the world and argues that in light of scandals the Church and Ratzinger’s responsibility as a world leader, diplomatic immunity leaves silence where there should be explanations and accountability.

Why am I excited to be publishing it?  This book suits one of the key goals at Arsenal Pulp Press: to produce literature that traverses uncharted territories while challenging, stimulating, and asking probing questions about the world around us. Neither a hateful diatribe nor a knee-jerk response to headlines, The Trial of Pope Benedict carefully and intelligently illuminates Ratzinger’s outdated, aggressive positions on women and homosexuality, as well as his profound silence on the Church’s recent financial and sex scandal crises.  The Trial of Pope Benedict bravely gives voice to those who have been marginalized and victimized by the very institution in which they hold trust and faith.  It considers the potential for change in the Catholic Church and suggests how the newly appointed Pope Francis could move the Church into a more compassionate, reasonable, and accepting institution.

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Missi Smith is an Assistant Publicist at 45^th Parallel Communications, the publicity and marketing firm representing Arsenal Pulp Press.

The Audio Series: Jessica Westhead

Our audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen." is an incredibly special one for us. Hatched in a NYC club during BEA week, this feature requires more work of the author than any of the ones that have come before. And that makes it all the more sweeter when you see, or rather, hear them read excerpts from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.


Today, Jessica Westhead reads from her 2011 short story collection And Also Sharks, which was a a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book and a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Short Fiction Prize. Jessica lives in Toronto, Canada. Her short fiction has appeared in major literary journals in Canada and the US, and her novel Pulpy & Midge was published by Coach House Books in 2007. She was shortlisted for the 2009 CBC Literary Awards and selected for the 2011 Journey Prize anthology.

Click the soundcloud file below to experience And Also Sharks as read by Jessica Westhead:

The word on And Also Sharks:

The forlornly funny stories in And Also Sharks celebrate the socially awkward, the insecure, the unfulfilled, and the obsessed. A disgruntled follower of a self-esteem blog posts a rambling critical comment. On the hunt for the perfect coffee table, a pregnant woman and her husband stop to visit his terminally ill ex-wife. The office cat lady reluctantly joins her fellow employees' crusade to cheer up their dying co-worker. A man grieving his wife's miscarriages follows his deluded friend on a stealth photo-taking mission at the Auto Show. A shoplifter creates her own narrative with stolen anecdotes and a kidnapped baby. In this collection, society's misfits and losers are portrayed sympathetically, and sometimes even heroically. As desperately as these characters long to fit in, they also take pride in what sets them apart.
*lifted with love from goodreads

FOUR FATHERS interview series: Dave Housley

It's the fourth and final installment of our four-part author interview series! We partnered with Cobalt Press, a brand spanking new small press publisher, to help spread the word about their kickstarter event for FOUR FATHERS, a collection of fatherly essays and stories by contributing authors Tom Williams, Ben Tanzer, BL Pawelek, and Dave Housley. (The kickstarter event closes on Monday. Feel free to check it out and if you are so inclined, throw a few bucks at it. You know you want to. Would I steer you wrong?)

Yesterday, we featured Tom Williams interviewing fellow contributor BL Pawelek.

Today, Dave Housely takes on BL Pawelek's questions:

The Four Fathers Interview Series:

Dave Housley

BL Pawelek: Have you ever been fired from a job? What did you do?

Dave Housely: I’ve only been fired from one job, and it was the first job I ever had, cutting the lawn for the man who is now my father in law. I was maybe twelve, and wanted money for, I don’t know, Van Halen records and popsicles. My father hooked me up with this job cutting the yard for my now father in law. I think I did that for a summer. My main memory is of this German shepherd who I remember as being about ten feet tall, who would stalk from window to window and bark furiously at me as I was doing the parts where the yard abutted the house. I was terrified of that dog, and apparently did a less than stellar job, because the next summer I was unceremoniously replaced by a kid from their neighborhood. I remember thinking, huh, that’s odd. It was the first time I had an inkling that maybe I had done a lousy job at something, and been kind of lazy, and it had cost me. I was so scared of that dog, though – a dog that my wife says was actually quite small for a shepherd (a fact that is in dispute, because I remember all ten feet of that dog snapping at my through the window) that it was fine with me. I was probably hoping to get a glimpse of the woman who is now my wife, but all I got was that terrifying, gigantic dog. 

BP: If you had a million dollars to spend on one food and eat it, what would it be?

DH: This is a very odd question. I would probably buy one million dollars worth of El Pollo Rico Peruvian chicken from Washington, DC. We used to live about a mile from that place, and moved to Pennsylvania five years ago, and it’s still one of the things I miss most about DC. If I had one million dollars I would open up an El Pollo Rico in my house and eat it for the rest of my life.

BP: When were you no longer a boy, but a man?

DH: I have a distinct memory of waking up maybe a month after starting my first real job and having this sense of dread that I had to go to work and I didn’t have a choice and this was pretty much how it was going to be for the rest of my life. I guess that’s a really depressing way to look at that transition, but I do think of that as a kind of coming of age lightbulb moment. That first month was kind of a novelty and a relief – I had a real job, after all, which was something we all wanted at that time (fresh out of college, sleeping on a friend’s couch in Alexandria, Virginia). But that idea of permanence hadn’t yet been processed in my brain, I suppose, until that morning. All of the sudden, I realized there wasn’t a finish line here – no graduation, no summer vacation – just getting out of bed and driving around the beltway and sitting in this office and doing my work.

A lot of what I’m writing about, still, is people coming to grips with that idea that the years of potential – in FOUR FATHERS it’s expressed as the idea that “anything can happen” – are essentially over, that the things that can happen are limited now, decisions have been made and paths chosen. For a lot of people, I think having children cements that idea, and it can be a hard thing to come to grips with. See how I bring the book back into that question? Marketing!

BP: Why did you want to have a kid like me?

DH: Shit just got REAL, Pawelek! This is a really tough question to answer. Wow, can I quote a Todd Parr book? At the risk of being totally corny, there’s a book about adoption that he wrote and it answers that question pretty nicely (our son, Ben, is adopted). This is the parents talking to the kid about why they’ve adopted him/her: “Because you needed somebody to love you, and we had love to give.” That’s better than any five thousand words I could write on it, I think.

BP: How much money is enough money?

DH: Everybody only needs enough money to purchase a lifetime supply of Peruvian chicken, the estimated cost of which is roughly one million dollars. 

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Dave Housley is the author of the story collections "If I Knew the Way, I Would Take You Home," forthcoming from Dzanc, and "Ryan Seacrest is Famous." His work has appeared in The Collagist, Hobart, Mid-American Review, Nerve, Wigleaf, and some other places. He's one of the founding editors and fiction editors and all around do-stuff people at Barrelhouse magazine (barrelhousemag.com). He lives in State College, PA with his wife Lori and son Ben. 

FOUR FATHERS interview series: BL Pawelek

It's the third installment of our four-part author interview series! We partnered with Cobalt Press, a brand spanking new small press publisher, to help spread the word about their kickstarter event for FOUR FATHERS, a collection of fatherly essays and stories by contributing authors Tom Williams, Ben Tanzer, BL Pawelek, and Dave Housley. (The kickstarter event closes on Monday. Feel free to check it out and if you are so inclined, throw a few bucks at it. You know you want to. Would I steer you wrong?)

Yesterday, we featured Dave Housley interviewing fellow contributor Ben Tanzer.

Today, BL Pawelek attacks a handful of questions from Tom Williams:

The Four Fathers Interview Series:

BL Pawelek

Tom Williams: Who were some important dads in your life?

BL Pawelek: When it comes male/fatherly influences in my life, there are really only two: writers Edward Abbey and Charles Bukowski. I first started reading them when I was 20, and I stuck with both of them for the next 15ish years. For me, that was a crucial timeframe of growth and development.

Both writers had many, many positive and negative aspects. Both of them were great examples of what a man/father could be, as well as should not be. I took bits and pieces of both of them to start growing into the father I am today.

I try to thank them every opportunity I get.


TW: What, if any, impact has fatherhood had on your writing life?

BP: For me, the biggest impact was in added/different subject matter. I am a huge “write what you know” type of writer. Before children, my writing was squarely centered in hiking, adventure, or nature writing. With the birth of my kids, it all changed. Almost all of my writing, and certainly some of “the best”, has something to do with my family.

  
TW: How do you do it all: husband, father, writer, wage-earner, triathelete?

BP: Well, out of all of them, the writer takes a back seat. The writing only happens when there is extra time and some motivation, which does not happen often lately.

As for the rest, I really think they aim toward the same goals: a successful and loving family.

As a husband, I truly believe I am the first and most important example of what a husband is supposed to be like to my son and daughter. An example of how a husband should treat and support his wife.

As a wage-earner, I have been so lucky and fortunate to have an awesome career in communications that is flexible and family friendly. Although I have been tempted with other “better” jobs, I have always declined for the fringe benefits of walking my kid to the bus stop, school lunches, and gymnastics practice.

As for the athlete, to be frank, I want to be as healthy as I can to stick around with my family. So I run a lot, and I hike a lot, and bike a lot. Plus, I actually really like to do those things, and I am a bit of a competitor.

Also, the honest truth. I could not do any of this well if I did not have an awesome wife, partner and love.


TW: Of we four, you're the only one with a daughter: is your dadhood any different with the boy and the girl?

BP: Completely different, mainly because they are different children with very different personalities, traits, and interests. However, it is the little things that make the biggest differences. For example, while I am writing this, my daughter is sitting on my feet, brushing her dolls hair, asking me if it is ok if we name her “Tangled” because her hair is so tangled, waiting for her mom to paint her nails. Her brother is doing what I did as a child – watching Spiderman after wearing himself out playing outside.

One of the best things about raising a daughter for me was that I knew absolutely nothing about it. I was one of three boys in my family, raised mostly with boys in the neighborhood. It wasn’t until I was 40 that I started watching the Disney movies with my daughter, realizing the differences between Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and Cinderella – which eventually became some of the subject matter of my writing for this project.

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B.L. Pawelek is a husband, dad, and hiker living in Eden Prairie, MN. He attended to Loyola Marymount University and has had his poetry and photography published in numerous journals. His previous poetry collections include Always/Siempre (Concepcion Books - 2013),  So Hold Me Tight and Hold Me Tight (Artistically Declined Press - 2012) and The Equation of Constants  (Artistically Declined Press - 2011). He has also been nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes.

FOUR FATHERS interview series: Ben Tanzer

It's the second installment of our four-part author interview series! We partnered with Cobalt Press, a brand spanking new small press publisher, to help spread the word about their kickstarter event for FOUR FATHERS, a collection of fatherly essays and stories by contributing authors Tom Williams, Ben Tanzer, BL Pawelek, and Dave Housely. (The kickstarter event closes on Monday. Feel free to check it out and if you are so inclined, throw a few bucks at it. You know you want to. Would I steer you wrong?)

Yesterday, we featured Ben Tanzer interviewing fellow contributor Tom Williams.

Today, Ben Tanzer tackles five questions from Dave Housley:

The Four Fathers Interview Series:

Ben Tanzer

Dave Housely: You're a very prolific writer, especially for a writer who has a full time job and two children. How do you do it?

Ben Tanzer: The simple answer is plastics. And ball bearings of course. But the more boring answer is a constant effort to schedule the opportunity to write on a daily basis, looking sometimes days ahead and figuring out where writing will fit and doing everything possible to stick to that opportunity. I also look to take advantage of opportunities where they didn't exist before. My wife and kids suddenly leave the house for an hour, and I grab it, and I write, immediately. I never wait for inspiration, sometimes I don't sleep, and I keep the more spontaneous fucking around to a minimum. All of which sort of makes me sound very boring, somewhat compulsive, and kind of like a dick. Was that your plan?

DH: In reading the pieces for this book, and in all of your writing, I'm struck by how honest you are about the daily frustrations, petty emotions, and all of the unattractive or ungenerous things that might go along with being a dude at a certain period in his life -- middle-agey, with responsibilities, frustrations, etc. In contrast, you're one of the most generous, positive, warm people -- especially writers! -- that I know. Do you worry at all about how your work will be perceived, especially by the people in your life?

BT: You're very generous and I completely retract that comment about your possibly wanting to make me look a dick. I do appreciate the kind words though, all of those traits are very important to me. As far the work goes and perceptions, that's a great question, and no, I don't worry about that. Not as a writer anyway. For the most part I don't walk around expressing those kinds of feelings, I find that embarrassing. But as a writer I feel permission to say what I want as long as I am not hurting anyone besides myself, and I work with the assumption that the people who read these things see them as a writer trying to say something they can relate to. I also don't mind if people think that maybe I'm more petty and frustrated than I let one, which I suppose is one advantage to being middle-agey, and married. That said, I also hope it sells books. Andrew, thoughts?

DH: Related to the question above, but something I've been thinking about a little as I edit my piece for FOUR FATHERS: what would you tell your kids if they were sitting down to read FOUR FATHERS? How old do you picture them being when you think about that (if, indeed, it's a thing you've thought about)?

BT: I have thought about this, and what I would like to tell them is that they will see slices of our lives, sometimes mine, or theirs, and that these slices were spun into something else, things I was trying to figure out, and stories that people can relate to. It also feels like there is a subtext to this question about whether I think they will be offended or upset by what they read. Which I guess is the subtext to my answer as well. I don't think these stories as a whole will be upsetting. They reflect more poorly on the protagonist if anyone, though as I re-read them, they are mostly about confusion and how we communicate, feeling abandoned, coping, and the million small things I constantly think about. And from that perspective, my kids only play a small role in these pieces, significant, but small, despite the content. 

DH:I'm curious about this one because I always write maybe five years after my own personal experience -- for some reason, it takes me awhile to process things in my own life and for them to start working into my fiction. When did this idea of dads/parents/sons/kids start working into your writing? Were you surprised? Afraid to go there? Or did you just Ben Tanzer the shit out of it and write like five books in row?
BT: I suppose I Bent Tanzer'd the shit out of it in one sense. Which makes for an awesome descriptor, thank you, but no doubt sounds very pretentious all at the same time. I always strive to write things in real time though, moment to moment, and so I am doing some of that processing you reference while I write and then seeing what happens. On the other hand Four Fathers is unusual for me to some extent. My novel Orphans that is coming out was a conscious effort to explore being a parent, a husband, and how work, and the need to work, can impact and warp those relationships. Four Fathers though emerged from a conversation we had and your invitation to participate. At the time I had just written a piece of flash fiction that was dad related, but that was only the piece I had written like that. Four Fathers made me wonder if I could continue doing dad-centric flash fiction pieces and I ran with it. I've also recently completed a series of essays for a collection titled Lost In Space, and in that case, I had always wanted to do something like that, but had no plans to do so until I was asked to develop a collection. After the request, I started seeing everything as an essay on this topic, and I started working on them. Which I guess is part of it for me, both in writing and work, the smallest suggestion can blow-up for me into an idea and when they do I try to follow the path that's emerging. The path has been dad-centric at the moment, and I am in it, so it's ripe, but it will pass, and in some ways it already has. 

DH: What are you working on now? Does it deal with these same kinds of matters? Or something completely different. 

BT: I sort of began to answer this question above, but as a coda, I've started plotting out and writing a series of things, a short story collection centered on a flooded town, a sort of third chapter to my New York Stories project; a novel with a teenage female protagonist, a missing brother, and UFOs; and an essay collection of pieces that may have nothing to do with dads. In fact none of these projects really have anything to do with dads at all on the face of it, though when I write, no matter what I set out to do, I endlessly circle back to fathers and sons, something that's inescapable for me apparently. 

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Ben Tanzer is the author of the books My Father's House and You Can Make Him Like You, as well as, the forthcoming Orphans and Lost in Space, among others. Ben also oversees Publicity and Content Strategy at Curbside Splendor and day to day operations of This Zine Will Change Your Life. He can be found online at This Blog Will Change Your Life the center of his growing lifestyle empire.

Book Giveaway: Happy Talk

Since July 2010, TNBBC has been bringing authors and readers together every month to get behind the book! This unique experience wouldn't be possible without the generous donations of the authors and publishers involved.

I'm excited to to bring you next month's 

Author/Reader Discussion book!

We will be reading and discussing Happy Talk 

with author Richard Melo

In order to stimulate discussion,
Red Lemonade has offered up 10 print copies to US residents

and 10 PDF copies internationally

Here is the goodreads description to whet your appetite:

Gun-slinging American student nurses and boozy New York playwrights-turned-educational-filmmakers find themselves stuck in the Haiti of 1955 as part of a government plan to pump up tourism and turn the Magic Island into the next Hawaii. The story follows the travels of Culprit Clutch, who appears mostly through rumor and innuendo, and his strange encounters with a plane-hopping British spy, Haitian street magicians, and a Scandinavian zombie. Josie, Culprit's ghostly paramour with a morphine habit, may or may not have voodoo spirits flowing through her, but the power-mad doctor channeling Baron Samedi is sure as hell bent on Culprit's destruction. The novel’s cascading epilogues include a legendary car race down the length of Mexico; street theatre in Golden Gate Park, circa 1968; a Skylab mutiny; origins of the musical comedy Godspell; and cameos by the Nation of Islam and early followers of Jim Jones.

This giveaway will run through August 8th. 

Winners will be announced here and via email on August 9th.

Here's how to enter:

1 - Leave a comment stating why you'd like to receive a copy of the book, and if you are a resident of the US or live outside the US. 

2 - State that you agree to participate in the group read book discussion that will run from September 15th through the end of the month. Richard Melo has agreed to participate in the discussion and will be available to answer any questions you may have for him. 

 *If you are chosen as a winner, by accepting the copy you are agreeing to read the book and join the group discussion at TNBBC on Goodreads (the thread for the discussion will be emailed to you before the discussion begins). 

 3 - Your comment must have a way to contact you (email is preferred). 

GOOD LUCK!

FOUR FATHERS interview series: Tom Williams

Welcome to the first installment of our four-part author interview series! We partnered with Cobalt Press, a brand spanking new small press publisher, to help spread the word about their kickstarter event for FOUR FATHERS, a collection of fatherly essays and stories by contributing authors Tom Williams, Ben Tanzer, BL Pawelek, and Dave Housely. (The kickstarter event closes on Monday. Feel free to check it out and if you are so inclined, throw a few bucks at it. You know you want to. Would I steer you wrong?)

If you missed the publisher's introduction yesterday, click here to get yourself caught up. And then sit back and enjoy as Ben Tanzer asks fellow contributor Tom Williams why he parents and how parenting has impacted his writing..... 

The Four Fathers Interview Series:

 Tom Williams

Ben Tanzer: People always say why do you write, so I would like to ask why do you parent?

Tom Williams: To both questions, I think the answer’s the same: do I have a choice?

In parenting, though, it seems there’s a difference between being a parent and parenting. You can’t have one without the other, but to parent implies one is doing more than providing chromosomes, one is actively trying to balance a desire to shape and mold with a desire to open and avail one’s child to the world around him. I parent because I was parented well, too, and want to know that my son feels the kind of connection to me that I feel to my parents.

BT: How does being a father impact you as a writer, be that approach, time, themes, any, or all of it?

TW: I think we all have less time to do the kind of doodling and ceiling-staring that we used to do before. And in that way, I think that becoming a father has made me use that time more wisely and use it in a way that’s more productive. Also, when you’ve got, as I do, a little guy running around and wanting to hear ghost stories about his friends, the fiction I might be trying to put together at my desk becomes less important. And in becoming less important, that fiction becomes easier to write, because, like the ghost story I’m telling my son, it’s just finding the right words.

It’s funny. Whenever Finn wants a story, I’ll set up the exposition and he’ll say, “Suddenly, they heard a spooky noise.” And while I’ve not incorporated too many spooky noises into my fiction, I have been keenly more aware that all readers want more than just set up and intellectual endeavor; they want something to shake them up.

And you know, another significant change, which is evident in my second story in Four Fathers, “What It Means to Be,” is that fatherhood has made me think a lot about being a son: both the child I was and the adult I am now. I know that you, too, Ben, had the tragedy of losing a parent while you were rearing children of your own. And it feels so unmooring, so thorough, such a loss, and yet the one thing that never disappears is the connection you have. The memories you keep. And I don’t think I’ve even got that stuff started yet, that writing.

My biggest fear, though, is that becoming a father has turned me soft. My wife and I can’t even hear mention of tragedies involving children, will turn off the TV if the news anchors are talking about a day care scandal or school bus accident. Yet it’s hard not to be sentimental when you see a little human learning new words or eating with a utensil for the first time or chasing a butterfly he will never catch.

Of course, I wouldn’t be any kind of parent at all were it not for my amazing partner and wife, Carmen Edington. Since conception, she's the one who's been doing the real work.

BT: Has writing about being father caused you to re-think how you parent or your previous perceptions about the experience?

TW: I feel like I didn’t want to write about being a father, to be honest. Every time I’d start to write “What It Means to Be” I’d worry that in writing down my fears that they’d come true—which echoes fully my character’s concerns in sharing his past with his son. In actually committing to completing the fiction, I found myself maybe exaggerating rather than examining, as if to distance my true fatherly self from that in the fiction. I hope that I’m a better dad than James, my protagonist, is. Plus, I think there’s a certain narcissism in writing about yourself as a great father. And, to go back to one of my earlier thoughts, who wants to read about a dad who has nothing go wrong? What spooky noise upsets the balance in that idealized portrait?

BT: Even when writing fiction, what obligations do you think we have to our children in terms of reflecting some of element of their lives in our work?

TW: I think we owe them a fair analysis of their lives. It’ll be interesting to see my son when he’s four—the age of the son in my story “What it Means to Be”—because I’m doing a lot of guessing what a four year old is like. Yet I’m fixing for that character a foundation where he shares much more with my son than with my imagination.

BT: Do you think it’s possible to write pieces such as you have for this collection and not think about your own father and you relationship with him?

TW: Right now, at the risk of sounding schmaltzy, it’s the best it’s ever been, my relationship with my dad. But what’s particular to it is that we never had an easy relationship before. Here’s why, I think: My dad grew up without a father and in being my father he had no one clearly to model himself after. Now he’s a grandfather and it’s different: he did have a grandfather (even though that gentleman, my great-grandfather, was born in the 19^th Century). And I’d have to say he’s warmed to the role of grandpa far better than I have as a dad.

But looking forward, and spinning off far from your question, Ben, I’m projecting into a future where my son has a son and how he’s got so much more to look back to for guidance. Not just me, but my dad. His stories. I hope I’m around then. And if I’m not, I hope Finn shares with his son my stories (the ones in this book and the ones I’ve told him), and my dad’s stories.

Did I mention my fear that becoming a father has made me the worst kind of sentimentalist? Cue sunset. Cue Ian Dury singing “My Old Man.”

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Tom Williams is the author of two books of fiction, The Mimic's Own Voice, and the forthcoming novel Don't Start Me Talkin' (Curbside Splendor). The Chair of English at Morehead State University, he lives in Kentucky with his wife, Carmen Edington, and their son.