prayer songs

variables

ri/ght

stranger than fiction

xTx, On Reading

"Reading, for me, is a place to go, a place to be. It’s sitting on the bottom porch step, bare feet in the dirt, looking up at my still-young mother sitting on the top step in shorts and tank top, hair falling forward, legs crossed, long and bare, paperback in her lap, ignoring me for the words. Reading is a dirt-floor basement, with a hidden corner filled with boxes turned sideways, crammed full of well-worn paperbacks, spines lined with white vertical fold marks obscuring titles, authors. Reading is the smell of the musty dank and the damp of the pages waiting for time to turn them yellow. Reading is taking from those boxes, sitting cross legged in the basement dirt, turning page after page, finding out and then understanding what kept my mother ignoring me, summer day after summer day after summer day."


{xTx is a writer living in Southern California. She has been published in places like PANK, SmokeLong, Monkeybicycle, elimae, kill author, and Wigleaf. She has a free e-book entitled Nobody Trusts a Black Magician available at Nonpress. Her new chapbook He Is Talking to the Fat Lady was released November 15th from Safety Third Enterprises. She says nothing at No Time To Say It.}

Matt DeBenedictis, On Reading

"I first read out of spite, hoping to just see one series of bookshelves destroyed. Far from an actual decimation I only craved to see the ideas within the books worth little more than dust.

My families' library stood larger than the room itself, certain bound volumes created a shadow larger than myself while other books emitted a musty smell I have (thankfully) not come across since. Where a posed family photo should have stood a picture of Ronald Reagan commanded the room. He was riding a horse passing the part of America where militias attend christenings.

Inspired to defy I read anything that waved a blade at that room. It wasn't until much later that I began to read out of love for a story, a drawn feeling for a style, or anything close to literature.

I wish I could have started reading for that reason younger; uptight, over-political younger years, a defiance purely bred in the 'burbs.

I could have lit a match and read what matters to me now so much sooner."


{Matt DeBenedictis is the author of three chapbooks including Congratulations! There's No last Place if Everyone is Dead. He runs the press Safety Third Enterprises and talks with music artists for a un-secure living. His internet home is wordsforguns.com.}

Joshua Mohr, On Reading

"I used to think reading could change the world--that if we looked through different characters' eyes and hearts and souls, we might learn empathy. We might learn to be nicer to one another. But I'm getting older and more 'seasoned' (see: tired, lazy, disillusioned), and now I think of reading/writing mostly as entertainment. It's better than TV because it actively engages your brain--quality calories versus empty calories--and if the writing is good, for a moment, however brief, you connect with the world in an entirely new way. Of course, you come down and go back to being your normal self, but there's that flash, that blinding, ephemeral flash where you embody a character and experience a life that's entirely new."


{Joshua Mohr is the author of the novels Termite Parade, which was an Editors’ Choice on The New York Times Best Seller List, and Some Things that Meant the World to Me, one of O Magazine's Top 10 reads of 2009. He has an MFA from the University of San Francisco and has published numerous short stories and essays in publications such as The New York Times Book Review, 7×7, The Bay Guardian, ZYZZYVA, The Rumpus, The Nervous Breakdown, among many others. He lives in San Francisco and teaches fiction writing. Please visit him here.}

Rolli, On Reading

"The love of my life - wife, mistress, concubine - has always been - books. I am, unashamedly, a promiscuous, polygamous, adulterous lover of books. I've taken to bed a different book every night of my life. Apologies, of course, to those who can (and do) read the same shop-worn soft cover for twenty or thirty years at a stretch, but I could never manage it.

I love the figure of a well-made book, the texture. I never take up a book without cracking it down the middle first, and taking a good whiff. Age is unkind to books in every respect except odor. The older the better, here, with the oldest smelling, I find, of spice cake, or watered-down rum. The scent of thousands of books together is - narcotic.

My mania for books and reading started early. By age 20, my personal library exceeded two thousand volumes - a number some bibliophiles would sniff at, but to me seemed like the whole Bodleian crammed into a modest four-bedroom. There were books in cupboards and closets, on tables, under them, in piles lining the walls. It was never surprising to come across a volume or two between sofa cushions, in a flowerpot, to come tumbling out of a liquor cabinet. I more than once found a book in the Frigidaire.

Suffice it to say, amongst so much fine reading material, there was practically no room for me. So little that, exasperated, I came close to tying up a few essentials on the end of a stick - Boswell's Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson, Bleak House, and one or two others - and turning vagabond. It was the thought of all those books going untouched and unappreciated, alone, that saved me from vagrancy.

If books have been my life, they've very nearly been my death (and may be yet, who knows). A good host, I'm occasionally obliged to sleep on the floor, and make room for guests. With memorable results, this is just what happened one Christmas Eve. Of course, family begged me not to - the room in question sported two leaning towers of bookcases notorious for toppling over without warning - but I, the good host, insisted. 'It's perfectly safe,' I said, with a dismissive wave of the hand, trying hard not to show my trepidation. And as I lay there, late at night, in my sleeping bag, precarious shadow-mountains of books all around me, I'll confess - I was afraid. But I soothed myself, tallied up the probabilities, and satisfied, at last, nodded off. And then, at half-past three in the morning ... a crash ... then another ... then a deep, muffled scream. Of course, everyone knew what must've happened, and came rushing in from every direction - to start digging. What could've easily been an exhumation proved a rescue, fortunately, when they pulled me from the rubble, bruised and shaken, but still very much alive. It wasn't so bad, all things considered. I was unconscious for the initial avalanche; and the week of bed rest that followed gave me plenty of time to catch up my reading. A few scars still remain, 'potent reminders,' friends tell me, of the dangers of bibliomania. In fact, if you look very closely, you can still see HAMLET branded on my right cheek.

Thankfully, the fever to hoard has abated some in recent years; and while I read as much as ever, don't bother snatching up every book in sight, and storing them in the fireplace, or the garden shed, like some dotty squirrel. I've even paired down the collection, giving away, selling, and tossing out masses of volumes. I'm happy with my condensed library of a thousand-or-so indispensable favorites. They should be enough for a lifetime of reading. But I'll have to start right now."


{Rolli is the author/illustrator of the acclaimed poetry/art book Plum Stuff (8th House Publishing), and the forthcoming gothic novel-in-poems Mavor's Bones. Visit his website here and follow him on Twitter here.}

Peter Trachtenberg, On Reading

"In the morning I feed the cats, make a pot of coffee and sit down on the sofa and open a volume of Remembrance of Things Past, in the Montcrieff Kilmartin translation. At the moment, I’m on The Guermantes Way, just after Marcel unexpectedly succeeds in kissing Albertine; he reflects on how inadequate the lips are for kissing. I read for an hour, almost as slowly as if I were reading in French. Sometimes I feel like I am reading in French. To navigate the topiary maze of Proust’s sentences, which can twine and undulate for an entire page, often requires reading out loud. The challenge is not just to follow those sentences’ syntax but also their turns of mood:

On certain days, thin, with a gray complexion, a sullen air, a violet transparency slanting across her eyes such as we notice sometimes on the sea, she seemed to be feeling the sorrows of exile. On other days her face, smoother and glossier, drew one’s desires on to its varnished surface and prevented them from going further; unless I caught a sudden glimpse of her from the side, for her matt cheeks, like white wax on the surface, were visibly pink beneath, which was what made one so long to kiss them, to reach that different tint which was so elusive. At other times, happiness bathed her cheeks with a clarity so mobile that the skin, grown fluid and vague, gave passage to a sort of subcutaneous gaze, which made it appear to be of another colour but not of another substance than her eyes; sometimes, without thinking, when one looked at her face punctuated with tiny brown marks among which floated what were simply two larger, bluer stains, it was as though one were looking at a goldfinch’s egg, or perhaps at an opalescent agate cut and polished in two places only, where, at the heart of the brown stone, there shone like the transparent wings of a skyblue butterfly, her eyes, those features in which the flesh becomes a mirror and gives us the illusion that it allows us, more than through other parts of the body, to approach the soul. (1009)

As much pleasure as my morning reading gives me, it’s also a struggle. This isn’t because of the difficulties of Proust’s style, which, to be honest, is part of the pleasure of reading him--how often do you get to experience a sense of accomplishment while sitting on your ass in your bathrobe? It’s because I came into the kitchen with my Blackberry. If describing a Blackberry for a visitor from the last century--say for Marcel Proust, had he been somehow plucked off the Boulevard Hausmann in 1916and deposited, gasping and palpitating, in the eastern U.S. in 2010--I’d say it was about the size of a small cigarette box. That might connote its addictive properties. But it’s more like a black hole, a phenomenon that no one even imagined until decades after Proust’s death in 1922, a black hole that sucks up not matter but attention. I can’t go ten minutes without looking at it. If no new e-mail shows up in my message box--announced by a tiny red and white explosion that might be made by a tiny bomb--I use the Web browser to read the Times. Often I become so engrossed in an article--or, more often, in the clever or boneheaded but usually vituperative reader comments about an article--that fifteen minutes race by before I think of horny, hyper-aesthetic Marcel and his circle, and when I return, the spell they cast on me is broken. I open the book and it’s just words, lots of them. Too many.

Is the competition between Proust and the Blackberry a competition between literature and news? I don’t think so. If it were an actual newspaper on the sofa beside me, a paper one, I wouldn’t bother looking at it until I’d read at least ten pages of the Recherche. The competition is one between reading and something that resembles reading but is really a hybrid mode in which the familiar work of decoding clusters of tiny strokes and squiggles and extracting a world from them is a front for the hypnotic activity of pushing buttons and staring at a light-filled screen. The Blackberry allows its users to think of themselves as human while doing what lab rats do, except lab rats get rewarded with pellets of food. The reward of the Blackberry is the buttons and the screen."


{Peter Trachtenberg is the author of 7 Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh and The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning. For more information, visit his blog here.}

Ben Mirov, On Reading

"Reading is difficult. When I was young it was a physically unpleasant experience. I've never felt like a natural reader. Today as an adult, it's still a task to sit and read for a long period of time. I've never felt like a person who is a natural reader, who can consume large amounts of material with a high level of comprehension."


{Ben Mirov grew up in Northern California. He is the author of GHOST MACHINE (Caketrain, 2010). He is also the author of the chapbooks I IS TO VORTICISM (New Michigan Press, 2010) and COLECTED GHOST (H_NGM_N, 2010).}

Shya Scanlon, On Reading

"I have the kind of relationship with reading you can only have with something you know you’ll never quit. I love it; I hate it; I fear it; I beat my head against it; I use it as it uses me. I like to think it’s co-dependent, but I doubt reading needs me. It can walk away at any time, and that’s why I’m so jealous of its other lovers."


{For more information about Shya Scanlon, visit his website here.}

Savannah Schroll Guz, On Reading

"Reading, for me, is a completely delicious escape while also an opportunity to reconnect, since my view of the world and my internal monologues are often driven by what I am reading. I love Baroque descriptions, exquisite adjectives, stunning nouns. I’m especially fond of reading psychological descriptions. What does someone else’s internal world look like? This is why I go to Joyce Carol Oates’ work when I need to restock my own ‘word larder.’ There’s an intense beauty to her descriptions of angst (because with JCO, there’s always angst). Also, I return again and again to Günter Grass. I’ve read his work in the original German, but it’s the translations—the really good translations (I know how hard it is to match meaning)—I go back to again and again. My favorites are Tin Drum and The Flounder , translated by Ralph Manheim in 1961 and 1978, respectively (my copies are badly dog-eared). Both are like that really good first shot of bourbon, which seems to brighten and sharpen the look of the world. I seem always to be thinking about reading The Flounder when I’m writing, and conversely, reading any of the above makes me want to get back to writing."


{Savannah Schroll Guz is author of the short story collections, American Soma (2009) and The Famous & The Anonymous (2004), and editor of Consumed: Women on Excess (2005). She divides her online life here and here.}

Andrew Borgstrom, On Reading

"Eating the tail and being the tail and eating the tale and being the teeth. It is only because I consider myself a reader that anyone considers me a writer."


{Andrew Borgstrom resides in the Matted Welcome Desert.}

Howie Good, On Reading

"I wasn't a reader as a kid. I was way too restless to sit still and read. I did daydream a lot, though, making up stories in which I was generally the hero. I suppose all this imaginative activity contributed to my becoming a writer. It also -- and earlier -- contributed to my becoming a reader. I entered new and better daydreams through reading than I could find on TV or make up on my own. This isn't to suggest that reading for me was or is primarily an escape. It isn't. Rather, it's a kind of liberation from mental and physical contraints. You sit still while reading, but you can go anywhere in your head."


{Howie Good is the author of the full-length poetry collections Lovesick (Press Americana, 2009), Heart With a Dirty Windshield (BeWrite Books, 2010), and Everything Reminds Me of Me (Desperanto, 2011), as well as 23 print and digital poetry chapbooks.}

atchafalaya

ca-caw, ca-caw

the giving tree

kinski reads oscar wilde

the sun had left the sky

so i just go ooooooo

bonjour tristesse

cover me with words

Abayomi Animashaun's The Giving Of Pears

Eric Beeny's Snowing Fireflies






Matt Bell's How They Were Found





Kate Bernheimer's Horse, Flower, Bird







Paula Bomer's Baby And Other Stories






Mel Bosworth's Grease Stains, Kismet, And Material Wisdom






Ana Božičević's Stars Of The Night Commute





Blake Butler's Scorch Atlas





Jessie Carty's Paper House




Brian Evenson's Fugue State




Molly Gaudry's We Take Me Apart




Amelia Gray's Museum Of The Weird






Tim Hall's One Damn Thing After Another





Heather Hartley's Knock Knock





Shane Jones's Light Boxes







Bhanu Kapil's The Vertical Interrogation Of Strangers





Michael Kimball's Dear Everybody





Amy King's I'm The Man Who Loves You





Tao Lin's Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy




Kendra Grant Malone's Everything is Quiet







Joseph McElroy's Preparations For Search





Lydia Millet's Everyone's Pretty





Sawako Nakayasu's Texture Notes





Adam Robinson's Adam Robison And Other Poems





Caleb J. Ross's Charactered Pieces







Matthew Savoca's long love poem with descriptive title





J.A. Tyler's Inconceivable Wilson





William Walsh's Questionstruck





Mike Young's We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough

Angeles

i am here

And You Are Gone




Winner of the 2010 Outsider Writers Press
Fiction Chapbook Contest

Available here.


“Shome Dasgupta writes about young love with a heartbreaking honesty and simplicity that transcends anything I’ve read in recent years. As we follow Jonas and Mary from kindergarten to senior year, we see a range of textual expression that is both innovative and wildly appealing. This book cracks powerful with youthful thunder, black echoes laced tightly with ephemeral innocence. Dasgupta’s debut hits the mark, and leaves one.”

---Mel Bosworth, author of When the Casts Razzed the Chickens (Folded Word) and Grease Stains, Kismet, and Maternal Wisdom (Brown Paper Publishing)


“From the start, I fell in love with this book. Shome Dasgupta takes on perhaps the most common of all subjects—love—and makes it somehow fresh and new. Stunning in its use of form, language and character, i am here And You Are Gone is a delight. The book and its author are remarkable. This is the first you may be hearing from Shome Dasgupta, but I can’t imagine it will be the last.”

---Rob Roberge, author of Working Backwards from the Worst Moment of My Life (Ren Hen Press)


“In i am here And You Are Gone, Shome Dasgupta writes with a sparse and mathematical elegance, creating a system of symbols and spaces with which to describe young Jonas’ growing affection for his friend Mary. Throughout the too-fast years of their youth, the two friends hurtle across what must feel to them like a lifetime, moving like two near-parallel lines approaching the same point, one set so impossibly infinite that they might never reach it together. Still their paths pull close, closer, so close that no matter how we might look we may be unable to divine what unsolvable span it is that at the last separates them–and so perhaps us–from each other.”

---Matt Bell, author of How They Were Found (Keyhole Press)

Ken Baumann, On Reading

"I read in bouts. I haven't seen an end of all potential. There is too much to read, if you're looking. Better to stay blind, be irrational and impatient, and don't hold conditioning as essential to faith. Books have dictated my behavior more than I'd like to admit. Some are very beautiful."


{Ken Baumann is. }

Linda Olsson, On Reading

"I recently had an e-mail from a friend in Sweden. He told me he had been on his way to work that morning and had happened to be standing next to a young woman in the crowded subway train. She was reading a book and seemed to be completely lost to the world, with tears streaming down her face. As he bent over a little he could see that she was reading Astrid and Veronika, my first novel. The message moved me utterly, of course.

When I was a child living in Sweden we used to call grandmother every Christmas Eve. She lived in the US and it was expensive to make the toll call, so we had to line up prepared to use the short time allotted each one of us. When it was my turn I would press the receiver to my year and wait for the miracle. My grandmother’s voice. Her words in my ear sounding so close, as if she was there in the room with us. I couldn’t understand it. But it was a very short moment. Now, when my grandmother is long gone, I still have her letters. And in them I still hear her voice. See her face. Her words in her driven handwriting still bring out the feelings that we had for each other. I can see her, hear her. And it happens that I am moved to tears when I read them.

Writers are lonely people, I think. I am. My work, if you can call it that, takes place at odd hours, often very late at night, and in complete isolation. I have no colleagues to test ideas on, or discuss problem solutions with. Quality control happens only after the fact, when my manuscript leaves my computer. And I am rarely present when the miracle happens, when my words reach a reader. I do read reviews, of course (I have never believed writers who claim they don’t), but reviewers are not like regular readers. Their reading is work, while I hope that others will read for pleasure. I do get mail from readers and each message is wondrous. My readers, wherever in the world they happen to be, write to tell me that they have been moved by my words. The miracle has truly happened.

I still don’t understand how phones work, though I often rely on my mobile to connect me with those I love. But I am even more intrigued by how the written word works. How can it be that the symbols that I type on my keyboard can instil the feelings that I invest in them in a reader across the world? In many cases in translation, too. If I talk to a person on the phone, then he or she is at least partially present in our communication. But if I read a letter or text message we are communicating entirely in code. We can’t see each other, can’t hear each other. Yet, the other person is there, on my screen or in my hands as I read the words. I can see him, hear him and the letters in front of me have the capacity to move me in some way. Perhaps this fact contributes to the difficulty of making books into films. Readers have already seen the movie and any other version is likely to disappoint.

It is sad to consider that in spite of this extraordinary capacity to communicate that is imbued in the written word, it is so often used to mislead and deceive, and to communicate hateful or frightening messages. But abuse of power seems be present in all cultures, at all times. And the written word has enormous power."


{For more information about Linda Olsson, please visit her website here.}

Adam P. Knave, On Reading

"If we don't read, we don't grow and learn. It's one of the most important things anyone can do with their time. It's a muscle, and one that needs flexing and building so that we can imagine, dream and aspire to greater and greater things."


{Adam P. Knave is a writer who lives in New York with his cat and can be found here.}

Nik Korpon, On Reading

"I read because I write and I write because I read. They’re the same thing, though, so I never do one and I’m always doing another. When the words won’t come into focus, when they remain a nebulous cloud of frustration behind my sinuses, I hide in a book.

I take notes and diagram the structural scaffolding. I grab chunks of beautiful words so that I can steal them away, wedge them into my own work. Then I see a shiny object and forget what I was supposed to steal and the scaffolding implodes and collapses into a pile, the limbs of half-thoughts and shards of inspiration jutting out at grotesque angles. I toss aside the rebar and bricks, slice my fingers on shattered glass and, somewhere in there, lie the words I’ve been searching for. Mangled, ruined, pulsing and oh so lovely. This is how it begins and begins and begins."


{Nik Korpon is from Baltimore, MD. His novel Stay God (Otherworld Publications) will be released in Dec 2010, and his two novellas, Old Ghosts and By The Nails Of The Warpriest, will be forthcoming in 2011. He reviews books for the Outsider Writers Collective, co-hosts the monthly reading series Last Rites, and is a Fiction Editor for Rotten Leaves Magazine. Give him some skin, or danger, or just search and destroy at nikkorpon.com.}

Michelle Blake, On Reading

"I am a lover of books, books as objects, books as solace, books as a mean of escape and empathy and education. I need to have, on my bedside table, at least two books I have not yet started reading. Otherwise, I feel a little panicky, afraid that I will reach out one night into a bookless void.

At the moment, I am doing something I haven’t done in a long time--rereading, very slowly, a novel I already know well, Coetzee’s Disgrace. I am doing this so that I can begin to understand how he accomplished what he did in that book—how he moved his character from monster to saint without one moment of sentimentality, and all within the context of one of the greatest power shifts in the 20th century, the dismantling of apartheid. The author never flinches or backs away from brutality. This is one of my weaknesses as a writer, the desire to smooth things over, and I hope to gain from this book an iota of the courage Coetzee has always seemed to exercise so effortlessly, but never before with such astonishing scope and generosity.

One more thought about escape, empathy, and education: It occurs to me that we think of escape as a cheap and easy thing. But with a novel like Disgrace, while I do get to leave my own irritating life behind, I do not move into an easier world. I move into an infinitely more complex world, if only because the complexities (which I for one tend to minimize in my own life) are illuminated. And, so, I become more educated."

{Michelle Blake has published three novels in the acclaimed Lily Connor mystery series, The Tentmaker, Earth Has No Sorrow, and The Book of Light, about which the NY Times Book Reviewer Marilyn Stasio wrote, "Michelle Blake’s series about an Episcopal priest…stands out for a couple of reasons—besides the essential one of being written with intelligence and grace.” Blake’s fourth novel, Hill Country With Angels, is not part of the mystery series, though it does include an art heist, a psychic, and the promise of redemption. She is now at work on a collection of essays, Grown Children.}

Dennis McFarland, On Reading

"When I was a child in grammar school, we were regularly administered 'standardized tests,' and the part I always had the most trouble with was the reading section. You were given a big block of text to read, and then you had to answer questions about it. I never had adequate time to finish, because I read so slowly. Not much has changed. To me, the verb read means 'de-code and file.' The de-coding must be done slowly and sometimes the file cabinet is too full for further data. My entry into the text is always accompanied by reluctance. It’s like exploring a new friendship I feel shy about. And I pretty much require total silence. All this is to say, it’s work for me. Under these circumstances, when it’s good, it’s very good, and when it’s not-good it’s … well, usually aborted."

{Dennis McFarland is the author of six novels. He lives in rural Vermont with his wife, writer Michelle Blake. For more information, visit his website here.}

cle elum (the sun teaser)

1:48-2:28

1:02-1:39

0:22-0:46

2:38-2:44

2:14-2:34

Joseph Young, On Reading

"I read so many things for so long that I think my brain said, no more words for now, give me pictures instead. So, I stuffed myself with pictures. After a while my brain said, ok give me words again. Now many of my favorite words are pictures themselves—opaque, dense, not shining their light elsewhere but a light being shone on them."


{Joseph Young lives in Baltimore. His book of microfictions, Easter Rabbit, was released by Publishing Genius in December 2009. His new vampire novel, NAME, can be purchased here.}

Ken Sparling, On Reading

"My dad gave me a copy of Catcher in the Rye when I was fourteen. He said he read it when he was a young boy and loved it. What I felt reading Catcher in the Rye excited and confused and frightened me.

There was swearing in Catcher in the Rye. It was the first time I’d seen the word ‘fuck’ in a book, and it excited me to think this was possible, that someone would be allowed to write ‘fuck’ in a book, and that I would be allowed to read the word ‘fuck’ in a book, and that no one would try to stop me, and that, in fact, my dad had actually given me a book to read knowing that it said ‘fuck’ in it. This confused me. This blurred my understanding of the world in a way that made me understand that there were things possible coming toward me that I could never anticipate. I wanted to go toward these things and feel this blurry confused excitement again and again.

The only book I remember reading before Catcher in the Rye was The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. This book also frightened and confused me. I hated the fact that every time Bartholomew took off one hat another one appeared in its place. This drove me nuts. I was scared to death when the king threatened to cut Bartholomew’s head off. It didn’t seem fair. It seemed awful to me that a king would do such a thing. It seemed awful that there seemed to be nothing Bartholomew could do to save his head, no matter how good his intentions were. It scared and confused me to read this book. And yet I went back to read it again and again.

I think I must like to read things that hurt and confuse me. When I think about the best things I’ve ever read, they are things that hurt so much I’ve had to stop reading and go back into the world. And when I get back to the world from these books that throw me back into the world, I feel the pain of the world in a new way, a way that confuses and excites and frightens me.

Somehow, the pain of reading certain pieces of writing seems to help me confront and encounter the pain of the world in a way that makes the pain of the world seem worthwhile. I try not to run away from the pain of the world, but at some point I always do, and often I do it by reading. And then I again have to find some way to escape the numbness that robs me of the pain that makes life feel so good when I don’t run away from the pain of being alive.

Sometimes I do read simply to escape. A lot of times, actually. But sometimes I come across a piece of writing that operates exactly the opposite of the things I read to simply escape the world; a piece of writing that throws me back into the world where I can again feel the pain that I hunger to feel when I’ve found myself with the strength to withstand, and even embrace the pain of the world."


{Contact Ken Sparling here to get any of his Pedlar Press books, including his most recent novel, Book. Visit Ken here to find out about his book Hush Up And Listen Stinky Poo Butt, published by Artistically Declined Press.}

Jamie Iredell, On Reading

"Reading is, plain and simply, the backbone (or psychobiomaterial, to not be so chordatathropic) of a fully-developed free civilization. Remember that under the three-estate system of European feudalism there was the royal estate (literate), the clerical estate (literate), and everybody else (the illiterate)? People like Joseph Stalin (despite the later Soviet Union's push for a 100% literacy rate) relied on illiteracy to kill 30 million Ukranians, and Mao Tse Tung relied on the ignorance of the peasant class during the Cultural Revolution, during which approximately 40 million died. For all we know Kim Jong Il uses illiteracy now to subjugate North Koreans. But we don't know because there's no fucking writing coming out of there. Here, in the United States of America, we have a program called No Child Left Behind. That program--along with a general demise of readers and an influx of competing 'entertainments' (television, film, video games) in recent decades--encourages a reliance upon one-stop-shop education. Information, like, for example, what's found on websites, is encouraged. Not literacy or critical thinking. Anyone can tell you that the sky is blue, but only someone who has thought about what they've read, and read some more, can talk about the oxygen, nitrogen, and trace elements that scatter light to reflect the color blue. Shit, only someone who's literate can tell you that there's no such thing as color, only light spectra. There isn't even journalism anymore. Everyone's a pundit, whatever the fuck that means these days. As far as I can tell, all it seems to mean is that they have a pretty angry opinion about assholes like Lyndsey Lohan. So, as the whole shithole comes to a collapsing bang, don't think to thank the writers you're not reading. Not that I'm worried about you 'thinking' or 'reading'. And by 'reading' I don't mean Stephanie fucking Meyer, Charlaine fucking Harris, or--jumping Jesus--Stephen fucking King."


{Jamie Iredell is the author of Prose. Poems. a Novel. (Orange Alert Press, 2009), and The Book of Freaks (coming in December 2010, from Future Tense Books). Visit his blog here.}

Rachel Kendall, On Reading

"There’s nothing better than a good book, a cocktail in hand, a cigarette smouldering in the ashtray, a comfortable chaise longue and... in fact, forget all that, just give me a good book."


{Rachel Kendall’s short story collection The Bride Stripped Bare was published by Dog Horn Publishing. Her novel The Blush is due to be published in 2012. She is the founder of ISMs Press and edits the literary zine Sein und Werden.}

Paula Bomer, On Reading

"Like many people of my generation, I was taught to read in the first grade. My teacher, Miss Buzolich, was a wiry, elderly woman with a grey, permed helmet of hair and glasses, who wore respectable shirt dresses and had a penchant for spanking. She also barked out her lessons. That said, she liked me, as I was a good, well behaved student. Fittingly, my earliest memories of reading coincide with my earliest memories of experiencing excruciating, debilitating anxiety. I was intensely afraid of Miss Buzolich and on occasion became unable to move or speak in fear of her rages. Sticking my nose in a book and being thoroughly transported to another world was a wonderful antidote to the terror of the classroom.

I learned to read quite easily and remember being terribly bored with the learn-to-read books. They came in different colors for different levels, yellow and orange being beginner books, green and blue and purple becoming more advanced. I graduated to real books quickly. Our family thought of reading as a privilege and a pleasure, not as a chore. One of the great joys of my childhood, met with tons of excitement, was going to the library before our summer vacation in a cabin on Lake Michigan. We were allowed to check out many books, as many as we wanted, and this was the equivalent to being let lose in a candy store. Once we were at the lake, we swam, played in the sand, and read endlessly.

In high school and college and thereafter, I read a great deal. I read for the pleasure of it still, the being deeply involved in other worlds, the joy of imagining a whole alternate reality in my head from the words on the page. I learned to read critically, as well, which I enjoyed for its quite different feeling, that of doing pushups for the brain, as reading critically felt muscular and vigorous. I think 'big' readers, people who read a lot, often do so to escape the world around them. I feel this is a great example of our faults being tied to our strengths. Social anxiety can be ignored when your nose is in a book. The actual act of reading is almost against being with people.

In high school, English classes and Creative Writing classes were my favorites. I loved studying Shakespeare, loved Catcher in the Rye and Great Expectations and the short stories of Flannery O’Connor. I think it was junior year I had a feminist, quite possibly lesbian, teacher where we read Chaucer alongside Alice Walker. My senior year I lived in Spain, and read Gabriel Garcia Marques, Borges, Cortazar, Puig and others in Spanish. It was in Spain where I also first read Hemingway. On my own, I had read all the works of Toni Morrison and it was during my teens and early twenties that I was interested in the modernist tradition, reading lots of Faulkner and other 'languagey' writers. That said, in college, I was obsessed with Jean Rhys and Anaïs Nin’s diaries. I didn’t study literature in college, I studied psychology and anthropology, with a few literature classes thrown in as electives.

After college, I moved to New York and worked in book publishing. I had to read books I would never have read otherwise and had to read two of them a week working as a foreign scout. I didn’t manage this job for very long. It broke my heart not to read what I wanted, not to read books that mattered to me, as most of what I read wasn’t very good. A large part of my life was taken away from me. I became seriously anxious and depressed. (And yet I did discover some contemporary writers who were wonderful, for instance, when I read The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers and recommended him highly to all of our European clients.)

I vividly remember quitting the scouting job and becoming a bartender. Suddenly, almost miraculously, the anxiety and depression lifted. I had more free time and that time I could spend reading whatever I wanted. I had time to read David Copperfield. I read Madame Bovary, Chekhov, Lolita, Paul and Jane Bowles. I read lots of Denis Johnson, huge amounts of Philip Roth. I reread Flannery O’Connor’s short stories as well as her two short novels. I reread Jean Rhys. And then I read Mary Gaitskill’s first story collection, Bad Behavior, and that was when I knew: I wanted to do this, I wanted to be a writer. I had been writing stories since high school, but I had never articulated, not even to myself, what it was I wanted to do. Reading Mary Gaitskill changed that. I applied to graduate programs in Creative Writing.

Reading is intricately tied to what I consider my vocation. I may read less than I did when I was younger, but I still more or less read daily, often for hours. Right now, I’m deeply engrossed in a series of books called the Cazalet Chronicles, by Jane Elizabeth Howard, the woman for whom Kingsley Amis left his wife. In their entirety, they consist of nearly 2000 pages. I am halfway through and in love—I just bought her biography—and a little perplexed as to why some of her work is out of print. This is maybe one of the reasons why I read-to experience love, joy, hilarity, pain, fear, anguish, hate-but to do it safely within my imagination. Maybe being a reader is in some ways an act of cowardice, because experiencing the emotional lives of characters is not as risky as experiencing them in real life. Or one could explain it more generously by calling reading a safe way of expressing voyeuristic tendencies. I have no doubt that, quite simply, mankind is wired to tell and listen to stories.

I have gone through times of despair where I wish I had chosen any other thing to do with my life, anything not so lonely. Reading a lot does not give one very great social skills. It’s sort of a self fulfilling prophesy-you read a lot to escape the world, and the less you are in the world, the less good you are at being in it, which makes you want to escape, and so on and so forth. And at other times, times like now, I am at total peace with being a reader and a writer. I’ve made my bed, so now I lie in it, with a book, of course."


{Paula Bomer is the author of the forthcoming short story collection, Baby And Other Stories (Word Riot Press, Dec 2010). Her fiction has appeared in Open City, Fiction, The New York Tyrant, The Mississippi Review and elsewhere. She's the co-publisher at Artistically Declined Press and the supervising editor of the literary journal, Sententia. Visit her website here.}

Johannes Göransson, On Reading

"I read about things that fascinate me. Of course they can fascinate in many different ways, many of them unwholesome, possibly even detrimental. Right now I'm translating Swedish poet Aase Berg's second book, Mörk Materia (or Dark Matter, due out in translation from Black Ocean next year). Here's something I just translated (provisional):

'The tentacle city glitters in a chain of streetlights and flicker globes. There pinheads jump around and pick sticky pionees. But Saskia in silk sinks down in the Ylajali River’s skin-blue whirls. The moraine-eels suck her stretched-out [inflated?] arteries. Moraine eels in a wreath of unmentionable water angles.'

That's just my rough draft. But that's what I'm reading this afternoon in Indiana. If anyone is interested, in August, I'm starting a new blog with some friends - it's called Montevidayo. It will be dedicated to reading."


{Johannes Göransson is the author of several books of poetry/prose and the translator of several books of Swedish poetry. He is the co-editor of Action Books and the online journal Action, Yes. He teaches at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.}

Aimee Bender, On Reading

"Reading. First off, it's incredibly intimate. Me, and the writer, meeting on the page. Paul Auster has a great line, something like 'writer and reader make the book, both' and I think that's a beautiful way of stating it. There's a duet in play. Part of my job, in reading, is to try to take in what the writer has put on the page, to bring enough of myself to it so that something activates.

Reading is often a non-linear experience for me. I'll race ahead a few pages to get a tiny sense of what's to come if I can't stand waiting. Then I'll go back, slow myself down, sometimes going extremely slowly, to get there. When I'm reading a book I love, I'll often read the lines twice as I go to take them in. I slow myself down again, to make sure I'm aware of what I'm reading. Sometimes it's too much. It depends on my general level of concentration. Also, my eye darts around, going to the bottom of the page, the top, reversing, back forward.

I did a map of this once for the journal Ecotone, it's the third map:

'Three Maps' (Ecotone, Volume 2, Number 1: Fall/Winter 2006).

If I'm reading a book where the language doesn't really move me, I'll read very fast, and sometimes it's nice to take a break like this and read a thriller or a cop book just to read for plot alone, because reading as a writer is often a painstaking process. A very meaningful one, but a slow one. It took me months to read Marilynne Robinson's book Home. A couple pages a day, sometimes.

That said, I also read for how the words look on the page, and Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein is a joy to read because it's so strange and funny and fresh and exciting, but also because it looks so great. The words just look really good together."


{Aimee Bender is the author of four books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998) which was a NY Times Notable Book, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000) which was an L.A. Times pick of the year, Willful Creatures (2005) which was nominated by The Believer as one of the best books of the year, and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010). She has received two Pushcart prizes, and was nominated for the TipTree award in 2005, and the Shirley Jackson short story award in 2010. Her fiction has been translated into ten languages. For more information, visit her website here.}

Sumanth Prabhaker, On Reading

"I know I must have read at least some books when I was little, because the public library in our city had really good air conditioning during the summers, so we were there all the time. My parents would sit in adjacent armchairs, reading periodicals and different newspapers, and my brother and I would be told to wander around until it was time for lunch. I know I read a lot because there wasn't much else to do in the library, at the time, and I know I loved many of those books, but I have very few memories of actually reading -- actually going up to a shelf and selecting something and finding a clean place to sit and read. It's really only the stories that I remember, like I just at certain points added their content to my brain.

When I remember first being very conscious of the act of reading were the few times my parents took me to visit their parents in India. Down the road from my father's parents' house was a little lending library made of scrap aluminum siding, three walls and a kind of roof, and the owner sat outside on a wooden stool. My father, a stranger to jetlag, would get up early during these trips and eat idlis at the table with his parents while my mother got herself out of bed, and my brother and I would walk down the dirt road and see what was to be had at the lending library that day. You could probably fit three full-sized people in there if they all stood facing the same direction. I don't know how this can be true, but I remember using empty Coke bottles in some kind of transaction for the books I got. I remember getting these books and taking them back to the house with me and I remember reading them way up close to the electric fan, which my grandparents brought out specially for me during these visits: the Famous Five and Secret Seven, Asterix and Obelix, and as much Tintin as my arms could carry.

Before they were collected in the hardcover editions seen in most bookstores now, Tintin comics were oversized and thin and a little unwieldy to hold; they were always there, on the walk back to my grandparents' house, and spread out on the carpet before me. You had to hold them with both hands to get a good view of the page, and the layout of the panels defied the easier left-to-right reading of the books I kept busy with at my hometown library. They were my favorite things. During the schoolyear, my father sometimes traveled to India on his own, and Tintin was part of what made it so exciting and dramatic for me when he returned home -- he would open his big suitcase on the floor and make separate piles of the treats he'd brought back for each of us, and at some point there would be a bright new comic for me, buried beneath some shirts. For a while it seemed to me that there was no other way to access these stories than by flying across the world and exchanging currencies.

The cities in India all have new names now, and the lending library has since shut down or moved, and the whole Herge library can be purchased online and often locally. I still prefer Tintin comics to pretty much everything else, but I think I was very lucky to have been introduced to them in this particular way, with the dirt road and possible Coke bottles. They were books that required work both to get and to consume, which made the story of reading them important to the story within them, or maybe the other way around."


{Sumanth Prabhaker is the founding editor of Madras Press, a non-profit publisher of individually bound short stories and novella-length booklets that donates its proceeds to charitable organizations selected by the authors. His novella A Mere Pittance was among the inaugural titles to be released last winter, benefiting Helping Hands, a program that trains capuchin monkeys to become live-in helpers to people with disabilities. For more information, visit Madras Press here.}

David Barringer, On Reading

"A book is the delivery system for a hallucinogen you ingest through the eyes and digest in the mind. Reading allows one imagination to taste the inside of another."


{David Barringer is the author of There's Nothing Funny About Design, American Home Life, Johnny Red, and Emigre 68: American Mutt Barks in the Yard. Visit his website here for more information.}

Bhanu Kapil, On Reading

"I read in order to emigrate. To not be there anymore. To leave the life I am in, if that is not too boring and repetitive a way to say it. It is boring to emigrate. There are airports, for example, and then a weird stretch some way in when it is too late to go back. In such a stretch now, and with family responsibilities that I never quite imagined - - I find myself reading poetry, or trying to read poetry, that is more beautiful than my actual life. I read the poetry of Dolores Dorantes, in translation by Jen Hofer in 'the red book.' I read out of the sorrow that comes over immigrants, all immigrants perhaps. Economic sorrow? Social sorrow? Anxiety that does not have a commercial antidote? I don't know. Note to self: Find out what is in other people's hearts. Start with my own heart. To summarize: I read in order to be a writer in the time I am in, which is a closed time. I read to open myself to time, which is the time that opens in turn to writing. I read to flee taut death; to embrace wet or sinking deaths instead. This probably is not making an ounce of sense. I read because it is all I have. It is the only way I know back to writing, other than an obliterating love."


{Bhanu Kapil is the author of four prose/poetry books, most recently one that doesn't exist: Schizophrene, forthcoming from Nightboat Books in Spring 2011. She teaches at Naropa University and Goddard College. Visit her blog here.}