9/3/2020 0 Comments Don’t Fizzle My StickNew story in Passengers Journal, “Don’t Fizzle My Stick.”
0 Comments
8/3/2020 0 Comments Another Lydia Davis StoryHappy to announce that “Another Lydia Davis Story” won top prize in Columbia Journal’s issue on loneliness.
7/30/2020 0 Comments An Outrageous ProposalA new story up at CHILLFiltr Review called “An Outrageous Proposal.” If you enjoy, please click the clapping-hands icon on the bottom. You’ll set your humble author up for huge prizes of enormous value.
3/30/2020 0 Comments Prose in the Time of PandemicProse in the Time of Pandemic
Prose in the Time of Pandemic: A Six-Week Online Workshop in Narrative Prose. Weekly exercises drawn from prose samples by (some of) the following authors: Carmen Maria Machado, Colson Whitehead, Kate Zambreno, Myriam Gurba, Justin Torres, Joy Castro, and others. Feedback from participants and instructor. No synchronous sessions–log in from any time zone at any time. Details here. Register here. 3/30/2020 0 Comments A Feast of NarrativeAvailable at Amazon.
Two stories, “The Quiet Mouse Gets the Cheese,” and “You Understand Me,” each a link in the novel Work Until Failure (a novel-in-stories, 85% complete), appear in this sterling anthology of Italian-American authors. Available at Amazon. 9/2/2018 0 Comments REVIEW This Is Not Happening to You [Pratik: A Magazine of Contemporary Writing, Summer 2018]Book Review—ROCHELLE ALMEIDA
What makes a Short Story work— and what makes it memorable Author Tim Tomlinson earned his Bachelor’s degree and his MFA from Columbia University. But, as his collection of short stories entitled This Is Not Happening To You reveals, he received his Ph.D. from the School of Life’s Hard Knocks. To read these stories whose settings cover vast geographical ground from Long Island (where he was born and raised) to New England, from New Orleans to Los Angeles, with the West Indies and the UK throw in for good measure, is to travel through the dark landscape of a mind that has known relentless struggle for survival. Only very thinly disguised as fiction, these strongly autobiographical stories admit entry into the writer’s bruised and battered psyche even as they depict the bravado with which crippling experiences were conquered and transcended. In the hands of a mediocre writer, such material, while remaining compelling, could easily degenerate into morbidity. In those of a master-teller, which is what Tomlinson repeatedly proves himself to be, biographical details coalesce with popular music, lyrics of well-loved folk songs or lines from award-winning poetry to become a purely breathtaking reading sensation. These stories expose the underbelly of places that harbor delinquents, drop-outs and drunks whose fraught lives become our concern as we labor through their relentless hussle to move on. And so we meet Bonnie Bray in ‘What She Was Calling For’, a story whose sparse style recalls of Raymond’s Carver’s minimalist prose as much as does its title—What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. A recovering alcoholic working through ‘The Steps’ that will liberate her from addiction, she telephones the narrator—himself a recovering from addict—seeking a meeting. Their difficult history, however, leads him to mock her efforts, to goad her even into regressing. From his slightly stronger perch of sobriety, the narrator looks down superciliously upon her struggle, willing her to suffer as he had once done while he’d remained under the combined addictive influence of alcohol and infatuation. Their conversational dance, each step cautiously and meticulously choreographed, keeps the reader on tenterhooks wondering where the encounter will end or, indeed, where it might lead. The world is full of recovering addicts. Only a few of them have the powers of articulation that the narrator of the title story, ‘This Is Not Happening To You’ can boast. In a staccato round of rapidly-fired phrases, we are given insight into the mind of an alcoholic and his typical Sunday routine in America’s Funville, New Orleans. In a stupor, the narrator, lonely and in despair, befriends a rat—before indignation at the sight of its teeth-marks embedded in his avocado, sole sustenance on a soulless day, resurfaces. Monsieur Rat must be annihilated. But then the narrator sees a kindred spirit mirrored “in the grimace of horror” on the creature’s grotesque face. And the rat lives another day. Like so many of them, this story is creepy is more ways than one. Empathy with animals is the subject of one of the collection’s most moving stories, ‘Reunion’, in which the narrator recounts his attachment to his German shepherd Wolf who “got into trouble” for being provoked into nipping at a neighbor’s ankles. The nameless ‘he’ of the story (called Cliff in another tale) envisages a farm, a meadow, a field amidst rolling hills, when informed by his father that the dog is being sent “to a good place’. When, after swallowing his endless grief with the prescription pills to which he had become addicted, a reunion with the dog occurs unexpectedly, the narrator, still a boy, finds him at a local pharmacy that he attempts to break in and enter. Horrified at the state to which his beloved companion has been reduced, the boy is determined to save him, only to be thwarted, in the cruelest way possible. Such stories leave the reader horrified, aghast and reeling in their rawness. Unable to leave their troubled pasts behind, the protagonists of Tomlinson’s stories are bitterly haunted as adults by regret, a desire for revenge, maybe even a hankering after closure when their painful childhoods collide with daily life. A psychotic conversation between an adult son and his elderly mother in ‘Just Tell Me Who It Was’ keeps the reader as stressed as the old woman who is insistently forced into confronting her husband’s infidelity. Tomlinson’s deftness of touch captures, with scary accuracy, the details of such an exchange–tactics used by the woman to evade accusing questions and the determination of her son to get to the bottom of his suspicions. Perhaps he believes that assigning blame will permit him to make peace with his torment and maybe even make peace with the mother who tolerated a cheating, abusive husband. It is characters such as these that Tomlinson depicts: haunted by the ghosts of their disturbed pasts, happiness eludes them in their presents. Indeed, aside from crafting stories that repel as much as they fascinate, Tomlinson proves himself to be a skillful editor. His protagonists depict a vast appetite for sex, drink, drugs and danger; but there is not an extraneous word in their expression, not a spare sentiment to be found. The author fires straight from the shoulder and slays the reader with every shot. Just when one has digested the full impact of one plot, one is bombarded by another—but in the quietest, most sinister, most devastating fashion possible. Tomlinson’s skill as a narrator is akin to that of a thespian whose fullest impact is most felt when his lines are whispered. Read these stories not only to understand how the hunted Jean Valjean might have felt in Victor Hugo’s masterpiece or how Gregor Samsa felt when transformed into a giant insect in Kafka’s greatest work. But also read these stories to discover what makes a short story work—and what makes it memorable. This Is Not Happening To You—Short Stories by Tim Tomlinson Winter Goose Publishing, North Hampton, New Hampshire, 2017 Paperback, $14.99 IAWA New York City Literary Series Presents Sept 2018Saturday, Sept 8, 2018 @ 5:45 – 7:45 pm
John Domini has published three novels and three books of stories, the latest MOVIEOLA! (Dzanc, 2016). The book earned good notices; J.C. Hallman, in The Millions, called it “a new shriek for a new century.” Shorter fiction has appeared in Paris Review and elsewhere, and non-fiction — much of it about Naples and his Southern Italian family — in the New York Times and elsewhere. He has taught at Harvard and other places, and much of his literary criticism is collected in The Sea-God’s Herb (2014). He’s won a literature fellowship from the NEA, and one of his novels, in translation, was runner-up for Italy’s Domenico Rea award. A new novel, set in Naples, will appear in 2019. General information is at www.johndomini.com. Tim Tomlinson is a co-founder of New York Writers Workshop and co-author of its popular text, The Portable MFA in Creative Writing. This Is Not Happening to You, his first collection of short fiction, appeared in November 2017. He is also the author of Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire (poetry), and Yolanda: An Oral History in Verse. His work has been published in China, the Philippines, Singapore, and Australia, and anthologized in the Brooklyn Poets Anthology, We Contain Multitudes: Twelve Years of Softblow, and Long Island Noir. He is a member of Asia Pacific Writers & Translators. He teaches in the Global Liberal Studies Program at NYU. WHERE: Cornelia St. Cafe @ 29 Cornelia St. About Cornelia St. Café …. recently featured on USA Today’s 10Best Places for Live Music WHEN: Saturday, Sept 8, 2018 @ 5:45 – 7:45 pm COVER: $10 includes complimentary drink. CONTACT: www.corneliastreetcafe.com; or 212-989-9319. DIRECTIONS: A, B, C, D, E, F, and M to West 4th St. or 1 to Christopher St.-Sheridan Sq. 9/30/2017 0 Comments Reading at Red Room October 5 w/Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Ali Cobby Eckermann, and Roberta AllenAli Cobby Eckermann Yankunytjatjara Aboriginal poet Ali Cobby Eckermann is the author of seven books, including the verse novel Ruby Moonlight, the poetry collection Inside My Mother, and the memoir Too Afraid to Cry. In 2017 she was awarded Yale University’s Windham Campbell Prize in Poetry.
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is a Liberian civil war survivor who immigrated to the United States with her family in 1991 during the fourteen-year Liberian civil war. She is the author of five books of poetry: When the Wanderers Come Home, (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), Where the Road Turns (Autumn House Press, 2010), The River is Rising (Autumn House Press, 2007), Becoming Ebony, (Southern Illinois University Press, 2003) and Before the Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa (New Issues Press, 1998). She is also the author of a children’s book, In Monrovia, the River Visits the Sea, (One Moore Books, 2012) Her poem, “One Day: Love Song for Divorced Women” was selected by US Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser, as an American Life in Poetry June 13, 2011, featured poem. Patricia has won several awards and grants, including a 2016 WISE Women Award from Blair County, Pennsylvania, 2011 President’s Award from the Blair County NAACP, the 2010 Liberian Award for her poetry and her mentorship of young Liberians in the Diaspora, a Penn State University AESEDA Collaborative Grant for her research on Liberian Women’s Trauma stories from the Civil War, a 2002 Crab Orchard Award for her second book of poems, a World Bank Fellowship, among others. Her poems have been nominated twice for the Pushcart Awards. Her individual poems and memoir articles have been anthologized and published in literary magazines in the US, in South America, Africa, and Europe, and her work has been translated into Spanish and Finnish. Patricia holds a Ph.D. from Western Michigan University. She is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Penn State University’s Altoona campus. A short story writer, novelist, and memoirist, Roberta Allen is the author of nine books. Her latest is the story collection The Princess of Herself (Pelekinesis Press). Over 300 of her stories have been published in such magazines as Conjunctions, Guernica, Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail and The Collagist, among many others. She is also a conceptual artist in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum. www.robertaallen.com Tim Tomlinson is co-founder of New York Writers Workshop and co-author of its popular text, The Portable MFA in Creative Writing. He is also the author of Yolanda: An Oral History in Verse, Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire (poetry), and This Is Not Happening to You (short fiction), which he’ll be launching at tonight’s reading. His work has appeared in Australia, China, Singapore, and the Philippines, and is anthologized in the Brooklyn Poets Anthology, Long Island Noir, and We Contain Multitudes: Twelve Years of Softblow. He teaches in the Global Liberal Studies Program, NYU. Writing the Addict: A Multi-Genre Workshop in the Representation of Addiction
In this six-week online course, participants consider the ways that addiction has been written about in poetry, memoir, and fiction, then borrow premises and strategies to launch their own work. The first week looks at a number of angles on addiction. Weeks two through five trace an arc: early experiences, deeper involvement, bottoming out, getting out. We’ll see instances of tolerance, withdrawal, relapse, craving. We’ll look at a few examples that deal specifically with various steps of Twelve-Step recovery. In each section, participants will be asked to write their own accounts, based on the craft or the content (or both) of the samples under consideration. The sixth and final week will look at methods of revision, consolidation, and publication. Workshop critique guidelines will establish methods of manuscript analysis. Each participant will receive at least one extensive analysis from the instructor. By the end of the sessions, participants will have an overview of addiction as it’s appeared in prose and poetry, along with several drafts-in-progress (of prose or poetry), one or more of which might lead completed, publishable work. [Models for course work will derive from some of the following sources: Ann Marlowe, D. Watkins, Kim Addonizio, Charles Bukowski, Solomon Jones, Mary Gaitskill, Robert Bingham, Emily Carter, Raymond Carver, Jeet Thayil, William S. Burroughs, and others.] 7/23/2017 0 Comments Robert Anasi, author of The Gloves, and The Last Bohemia, comments on This Is Not Happening to YouTHIS IS NOT HAPPENING TO YOU ranges with imaginative ease across locales and characters – a wealthy socialite in the Hamptons, a bitter old Korean War vet in the suburbs, a 30-something drunk in New Orleans with delusions of grandeur, and many others. Quickly sketched but nevertheless fully realized, these figures stumble into extreme (yet somehow plausible) situations that expose their all-too-human delusions. Above all, Tomlinson focuses on the cruelty of desire that makes each of us in turn predator and prey, martyr and buffoon. In the hands of a less assured talent these stories would offer only a grim accounting of human sin and stupidity, yet Tomlinson leavens them with humor that is by turns wry, patient, and tender, although never sentimental. Sui generis as Tomlinson’s sensibility is, it draws on one of the richest veins in American Letters, ‘Made in New York’ stamped on every insight and sentence. By turns sardonic, irreverent, bold, psychologically astute and always engaging, Tomlinson has placed himself in the company of celebrated New York writers past, a pantheon that includes Hart Crane, Anatole Broyard, Dorothy Parker, and above all Leonard Michaels, who would have recognized a kindred spirit in the pages of TINHTY. While the city that provided inspiration to generations of artists has all but disappeared, in Tomlinson’s stories we encounter a late florescence of the unique sensibility that New York gave to the world.
–Robert Anasi, author of The Gloves: A Boxing Chronicle, and The Last Bohemia: Scenes from the Life of Williamsburg, Brooklyn Person, Place, Prose, Poem: A Writing Intensive (w/Tim Tomlinson)
Person, Place, Prose, Poem focuses on several of the most important components of poetry, fiction, and/or memoir: character, setting, and plot. Exercises, drafts, critique, in a process-oriented workshop. Sat Jan 28: 11:00 am – 2:00 pm and Sun Jan 29 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm — Cost: $115 / Max: 25 participants Register at: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/person-place-prose-poem-a-writing-intensive-with-tim-tomlinson-tickets-30441412083 Tim Tomlinson is a co-founder of New York Writers Workshop and co-author of its popular text, The Portable MFA in Creative Writing. His poetry collections Yolanda: An Oral History in Verse (a chapbook), and Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire, appeared in 2016. This Is Not Happening to You, a collection of short fiction, will appear in 2017. His work in poetry and prose has been published in China, the Philippines, and in numerous venues in the U.S., including Blue Lyra Review, Caribbean Vistas, Lime Hawk, the Brooklyn Poets Anthology (forthcoming), and in Long Island Noir (Akashic Books). He is a member of Asia Pacific Writers & Translators. He teaches in the Global Liberal Studies Program at New York University. 7/14/2017 0 Comments Oz author Sally Breen (Atomic City, The Casuals) on This Is Not Happening to YouThis is Not Happening to You, the debut collection of stories from New York writer Tim Tomlinson, might just rescue the twenty-first century literati set from a jet lag inducing conservatism and PC hysteria. Tomlinson gets to the gutsy and often hilarious truth of who we are in prose that’s poetic and unforgiving – like a well-timed right hook. No sprigs of lavender here. Just a heady and sardonic car crash of characters you won’t be able to turn away from – murderous movie star widowers, wild boys and their dogs, rogues and their half grasped lovers, people on all kinds of edges, ex-poets at the bar. Tomlinson has the audacity to tell it how it is and we should get down on our knees and thank some dank, dark force of nature for that. – Sally Breen, author of Atomic City, a novel, and the memoir The Casuals
Come September, my collection of short fiction, This Is Not Happening to You, arrives. Early reads have been positive, and I’m so thankful to Sheila Kohler and Bronwen Hruska for providing the following endorsements.
These spare, unsentimental, and skillful stories draw us in from the start. Tim Tomlinson obliges us to confront our failures and foibles without flinching, writing with searing honesty and considerable courage about people in trouble of various kinds –and does that not include us all?--Sheila Kohler, author of the memoir Once We Were Sisters, the novel Dreaming for Freud, and eight other books If you like your short fiction sweet and prim with nice neat endings that land on the right side of the fuzzy moral line, DO NOT READ THIS BOOK. If you prefer your characters a bit unsavory, morally challenged and wildly memorable, you will not be able to put down this kick-ass collection. With zen-like mastery of language, a razor-sharp eye for detail and talent for finding danger and surprise in the familiar, Tomlinson holds his own with the best writers of the genre. --Bronwen Hruska, author of Accelerated And thankful to Mari Otsu for providing the cover painting. 5/19/2017 0 Comments A Review of Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire from American Book Review, Jan/Feb 2017Scorched Earth — Robert Kramer (American Book Review, Jan/Feb 2017)
This collection contains some elements rare in contemporary poetry, but also an attitude, an atmosphere, quite familiar from Twentieth Century American culture. The fresh features include vivid imagery, with emphasis on visual experiences keenly observed and precisely captured in language. These scenes may be of human forms and human interaction, or aspects of nature—living creatures and the environment they inhabit. Thus the intense and careful scrutiny, together with a meticulous choice of words, gives the book a hard, sparkling quality.The more familiar trait is evident in the overall tone—sparse, restrained, laconic, hard- boiled, skeptical, ironic. Even in the portrayal of what would seem to be deeply emotional situations, an atmosphere of “cool” prevails, reminiscent of much American prose fiction of the Twentieth Century since Hemingway, through film noir and Mickey Spillane, to the present. At first glance the pages look as if they held verse, with indentations, shortened lines of irregular length, and separate stanzas. But on closer inspection it is apparent that these are mostly pieces of prose broken up to look like poetry, and generally lacking in elements usually associated with poetry—rhythm patterns, rhyme, rhetorical tropes, etc. Of course, this is nothing new. Many poets since Modernism have discarded traditional poetic devices. But despite this absence, Tomlinson’s language vivifies the book. The careful selection of details together with the precision and aptness of the individual words produces a taut and heightened effect. Verbs, for example, are never merely the direct, obvious, generic choice. They are slanted, oblique, fresh, and often unexpected. Here goldfish do not merely “rise” to the surface; they “kiss” the surface. However, Tomlinson does make use of one poetic device frequently and effectively—simile. Some examples: “His iridescent slacks / shone like gasoline on a puddle,” “barracuda / flash silver as new dimes,” “Mezcal sizzles his ulcers like clams / in a wok,” “anemones limp as gloves half off hands.” In their own context these usages do not so much call attention to themselves, but rather heighten the animation, shedding light on the whole scene around them, providing a fresh view of the subject, and reminding of the bigger world outside that is always present and surrounding. With few exceptions, the basic form of these pieces is the anecdote, a tale told in a bar, a brief descriptive sketch, a meaningful, funny, or grotesque incident. The later poems are sometimes more reflective, linking past, present and future, disappointments, joys, expectations, worries, doubts. By and large the book is structured chronologically, with the individual poems following roughly the various stages of a man’s life. The first poems portray childhood experiences in the New York area, focusing on parents, sometimes siblings, grandparents, cousins, neighbors. These are followed by pieces describing the narrator’s itinerant adventures living as a laborer among the poor and down-and-out in various locations such as New Orleans, Florida, the Caribbean, the Western United States, Long Island, and again New York City. Some of the most moving poems are those that depict incidents from boyhood scenes of a distant father, sought, feared, deeply troubled. Equally disturbing are the accounts of bored middle-class American youth—rebellious, bitter, destructive, at times sadistic. The poems set in New Orleans are low- down, earthy, funny, vulgar, but not as poignant as the poems of boyhood. They are mostly anecdotes involving bar life in the Vieux Carre’s. The very title of the New Orleans sequence, Stool Samples, suggests its flavor. For it represents an amusing pun on the meaning of the word “stool”—referring both to specimens of feces, as well as the human specimens found perched on the stools of the French Quarter. The poems show little concern for contemporary social and political events, except indirectly, in the portrayal of society’s failures and victims, or as a brief flicker on a television screen.Abstract thought and abstract statements are generally avoided, but certain attitudes become apparent that could be seen as philosophical positions. Yet the whole approach is experiential. Several sources of philosophical unease cast their shadow throughout the book: identity, how to live, authenticity, and the suffering of others. But suffusing all of these areas are two underlying attitudes—a Whitmanesque sense of acceptance and openness as well as an ultimate skepticism and need for deflation. For with Tomlinson nothing seems to be rejected out of hand. The utmost crudeness and vulgarity can be embraced with pleasure and laughter. On the other hand, there is always a final hesitation, a stepping back from any statement that would seem too affirmative or too absolute. Many of these pieces end with some laconic phrase that deflates the high spirits that had gone before. The poem “To Sleep Well” attempts to provide helpful instruction for readers, urging them to give up their false self-image and allow the true self to emerge. It turns out that the false self is the one that acts responsibly, goes to work, arrives on time, and follows the rules. The true self is the one that “rides bikes/no hands through traffic,” gets drunk, stones birds, and smashes doors. And yet this advice is somewhat relativized at the end of the poem when the author wrote: “At least that’s what you’re thinking/on a couch away from home, unable/to sleep well.” In the long poem “Anniversary,” a chatty account of the narrator’s meeting with an old friend in Provincetown, all sorts of doubts arise about the sexuality of the friend he thought he knew, eventually leading to questions about his own identity and the meaning of sexual identity in general. Another poem dealing with identity is “The Goldfish,” almost a Zen parable, where the point seems to be that one is a different person at different times, that there is no fixed identity, that identity is a flux.To the question “How to Live?” Tomlinson would answer” “Live dangerously!” The poem “Gulf Stream” proclaims this in its statement of the purpose of art. Art is for “getting us away from anything that keeps / us from entering the deepwater.” These tight-lipped poems do not shed many tears. But they display an awareness of the suffering of others and of the injustice in the world, not shouted, but clearly recorded. “One day on the way to the Gym” reports of an old man loudly, cruelly, and publicly berated by his fashionable daughter. Poems about third-world bordellos imply sympathy for the prostitutes victimized there. American veterans, also victims of a system, become the close friends of the narrator. Perhaps the most affecting and also the most polished poem in the collection is “If Wishes were Horses,” an anecdote about a boy on a ranch who is repeatedly beaten by his father. His curiosity, his enthusiasm, his love for the horses are captured powerfully and succinctly. The conclusion is playful and humorous, but brimming with compassion. Sexual desire bubbles through these pages, whether at home, on the urban street, at work on the railroad, at a blood bank, in a pizza parlor, at dinner in a restaurant, on the ferry, at the beach, and always and constantly—in the bars. It is not romanticized, not sanitized, not condemned, but accepted and embraced in all its forms—but often accompanied by laughter. In fact, humor permeates the book, often understated, often a bit raunchy—but real. Occasionally it is satire, directed primarily against middle-class propriety, in other words, against complacency, phoniness, and hypocrisy. Then there is the humor in creative language itself, in off-color poems and obscene metaphors, in ingenious synonyms, such as in “Thursday Nights in New Orleans,” which begins: “Looped, wrecked, knackered, bent / shit-faced, blotto, twisted / out of my fucking tree / gourd, skull, off my coconut,” and continues for six more stanzas in the same merry vein, interspersed with snatches of inelegant bar chatter. And yet in an earnest prose poem dedicated as a memorial to his late mentor, entitled “American Hotel Revisited,” the narrator seems to feel some doubts about the course of his life. Perhaps it was not all so funny and not merely fun. “He taught me to question the myth of Jack Kerouac, and alcohol, and rock and roll, and pussy, pussy, pussy.” The most joyous passages in the book occur when the narrator is alone with nature, with the sea, observing appreciatively the creatures of the sea, yet himself not far from danger, dependent only on his own survival skills. Several poems describe lovingly and in precise detail such solitary experiences. Yet these same poems are tinged with regret at the oil spills caused by humans, and now devastating that lovely undersea world.But Tomlinson is not sentimental about nature. Even amidst this beauty, he knows: “Everything benign / is predatory. Everything passive / lies in ambush. It is a world you understand.” The skepticism and acceptance at the heart of the book remain. The unusual title of the collection comes from an elegiac poem with the same title, a long apocalyptic vision, a listing of all that was destroyed in the [imaginary?] conflagration, a detailed, realistic account of the people, places, and things that constituted a boyhood environment, looked back on now with both contempt and pity. Reviewer’s admission: There are several links and parallels between the poet and the reviewer. Both had families living around the eastern end of Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. Both, as teenagers would frequently hitchhike on Route 25A through Queens and Nassau and Suffolk along the North Shore of Long Island. Both, for a time, inhabited the French Quarter in New Orleans and became acquainted with the exotic bar scene there. Both have been denizens of New York City, over in Bay Ridge, uptown on Columbus Avenue, down in the village on West 4th St, and often traveling underground in the subways. However, they have never met. Robert Kramer is a widely published poet, playwright, critic, and translator of European literature. He is the author of August Sander (1980) and The Art of Kasack (1968), as well as numerous articles on the history of art and literature. He was formerly coordinator of the New York Poets Cooperative. Requiem For The Tree Fort I Set on Fire — Tim Tomlinson Winter Goose Publishing www.wintergoosepublishing.com/ requiem-tree-fort-set-fire/ 132 Pages; Print, $11.99 In Spring 2017, New York Writers Workshop launches into the online workshop world. The first offering is my course, Developing Fiction: A Workshop in Narrative Prose. It challenges the experienced, and it nurtures the beginner. It provides instruction and feedback in short story, the novel, memoir, and long-form narrative. I’m especially excited to create the space for a truly international workshop. To register, click this link.
I came across this YouTube video of John Lennon’s 18 most hated Beatles’ songs. This is my take on his take. What’s yours?
“A Taste of Honey”: yes, piece of crap. C-. “It’s Only Love”: wrong, love it, even the tremelo’d guitar that made Lennon cringe. In the Spring of 1966, I heard and felt its lyrics every time a certain Kathy appeared on the recess field. A-. “Yes It Is”: wrong, love it. So what if it’s derivative? So what if he’s plundering himself? It’s a bit teen-age angsty, but so is a lot of great rock ‘n’ roll (see: the Ronettes, “Why Don’t They Let Us Fall in Love?”). In the bridge, Lennon’s vocal goes exhilaratingly, cathartically over the edge. The only singer who does crazed romantic agony as well is Little Anthony. A-. “Run for Your Life”: yeah, nothing great happening here (and talk about derivative). B-. “When I’m 64”: OK, it’s “granny music,” but I love me granny (despite her appreciation for Lawrence Welk). What, we used to wonder, high on consciousness-expanding substances, was Paul attempting to illuminate for his audience of little heads? But no, it was, simply, granny music. B. “Lovely Rita”: Wrong. It’s not the words, it’s the music, the bouncy dreamy fun of it. B+. “Good Morning, Good Morning”: Right, piece of crap (and a good indication of how flawed Sgt Pepper is. If you accept Lennon’s assessment of these three songs—the center of Side 2—you lift the needle after the first track (“Within You and Without You”) and drop it on the last (“A Day in the Life”), and that cuts the heart out of one half of a wildly over-praised album. Side 1, of course, is not similarly afflicted, with the exception of another piece of crap, “Mr Kite.” C-. (“Mr. Kite” = D). “Hello, Goodbye”: Rubbish. Ashamed I bought the single. C-. “Lady Madonna”: agreed. A struggle for significance, but of what? An exercise that should have been saved for the archives. But easy to understand why Paul tried, given the majesty and resonance of “Eleanor Rigby.” C. (“Eleanor Rigby” = A+). “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da”: Well…a silly attempt at ska. Fun. And with four sides, there was room for it. B. “Martha, My Dear”: Wrong. Lovely. Enduring. A. “Rocky Racoon”: Right, garbage. C. “Birthday”: ditto. C. “Cry Baby Cry”: Hmm. I like this one. No idea what it’s about. Love the vocal, love the chorus. B+. “Sun King”: Wrong—the harmonies alone make it. The pidgin Italian, or whatever it is, wonderful. A-. “Mean Mr. Mustard”: yeah, not much here. But a good example of how something can be salvaged by what surrounds it. As part of the great medley, a not unpleasant cog. B-. “Dig a Pony”: Rubbish. Filler was better in the days before AOR. C. “Let It Be”: wrong. What Paul’s singing about is his mother, and loss. I remember thinking, though, how far it falls short of “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” the other white pop single that season that essayed gospel. I think the song would work better a bit less Beatled up (like that guitar solo—yecch). B+. The tally: 10 Paul songs, 8 of his own. I guess that’s fair. Six Mondays, 7:00 – 9:00 PM Feb 6, 13, 20, March 6, 13, 20 This is a workshop in prose fiction (it also accommodates memoir). I’ll begin each session with a craft talk based on published samples of prose, concerning various modes (flash, story, novel) and techniques (scene, dialogue, character, setting). I’ll devote the majority of each session to manuscript critique (three per session). Each participant will have work evaluated at least once. My workshop approach is grounded in a spirit of community, support, and encouragement, based on sensitive, honest critique. I consider the material that comes into workshop as in process, and I am committed to helping it along to its fullest, most effective realization. — Cost: $225 — Max: 15 participants
Register at: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/developing-fiction-with-tim-tomlinson-tickets-30441533446 Tim Tomlinson is a co-founder of New York Writers Workshop and co-author of its popular text, The Portable MFA in Creative Writing. His poetry collections Yolanda: An Oral History in Verse (a chapbook), and Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire, appeared in 2016. This Is Not Happening to You, a collection of short fiction, will appear in 2017. His work in poetry and prose has been published in China, the Philippines, and in numerous venues in the U.S., including Blue Lyra Review, Caribbean Vistas, Lime Hawk, the Brooklyn Poets Anthology (forthcoming), and in Long Island Noir (Akashic Books). He is a member of Asia Pacific Writers & Translators. He teaches in the Global Liberal Studies Program at New York University. Happy to announce the new residence for New York Writers Workshop, starting the weekend of Jan 28-29, at Arts on Site, 12 St. Mark’s Place. My two-day intensive, Person, Place, Poem, Prose, leads off, followed by intensives offered by Ravi Shankar, then Charles Salzberg, Christina Chiu, and Ross Klavan. Then, on Feb 6, for six Mondays, I offer Developing Fiction, a workshop in narrative prose that accommodates memoir as well. For further details, visit New York Writers Workshop website.
1/14/2017 0 Comments READING Jan 19Come to a
Poetry Reading at Station Independent Projects featuring Colette Inez, Tim Tomlinson and Ellen Pober Rittberg. Thursday, January 19 at 7 PM – 9 PM EST Station Independent Projects 138 Eldridge Street, Suite 2F, New York, New York 10002 bios Colette Inez: The Luba Poems. Tim Tomlinson: Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire. Ellen Pober Rittberg: 35 Things Your Teen Won’t Tell You. 3/13/2016 0 Comments March 13, 2016As we slide into the Ides, Major League Baseball’s Spring Training is in full swing, and major league climate change’s premature spring is in full flower in Brooklyn, sending the Mercury into the mid-70s (23C for my overseas friends), and the heavy coats into the back of the closet. In Chicago, Trump crypto-fascists exchanged blows with Black Lives Matter activists. In Simi (or seamy) Valley at the deification of Nancy Reagan, Hilary Clinton invented a progressive HIV-Aids policy for the Reagan Administration, which, in actuality, callously ignored the epidemic. And glorious slam poet/novelist Omar Musa arrived in New York for a series of performances/readings. I had the honor and privilege of reading with Omar at the NYU Bookstore (a bit like Perry Como opening for James Brown). Later in the week, Omar visited my Creative Writing: Places workshop where he explained that he wrote 80,000 words of Here Come the Dogs before stopping to consider, cut, and revise, a process that took the word count down to 15,000, before it began its climb back to the current length of 80,000+. An important lesson in the reality of the writer’s work. Later that same day, poet-novelist-blues-harmonica-specialist Kim Addonizio visited my seminar on The Addict, where she read from the verse-novel Jimmy & Rita, and explained how important it is to consider the addict as a person, as a fully dimensional character, and not solely as a case study.
Spring Break from NYU gives me five “free” days, and Daylight Savings Time has already stolen an hour. I’m gearing up for a new round of submissions–new poems, new stories–as I finalize the manuscript of my collection Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire (which Winter Goose tells me could arrive as soon as August!). AWP in LA beckons. I’ll be on this panel, and I’ll be reading at this event. Sin Fronteras/Writers Without Borders #20 is at the printers, replete with my story “Trap,” and that should be available in April. Also due in April, the Crack the Spine Literary Magazine Anthology, which includes my story “No More Dancing.” Meantime, some of my most recent work can be found on these screens: Brooklyn Poets, Lime Hawk, Helen: A Literary Magazine, Softblow, Mulberry Fork Review, and a couple of interviews at Gyroscope Review and The Manifest-Station. |
|