Introduction

The short life of a boy discovering how things come around again.

He was stolen long ago. He could not remember from where, but he always remembered he was stolen and imagined the birthmark on his wrist was something his father or mother also carried and that he could use it to find them.

The parents that were not his parents did what they could to raise him right. They wanted a child themselves, fantasized over it in countless infertile dreams until dream was no longer enough and when they saw him, they reasoned he was as good of a replacement as any. They thought he would be too young to remember the life he came from. Perhaps at times he did forget, fed and clothed and coddled – one could argue forgetting was easy. But the boy always treated them with a cold suspicion, even when he forgot – as if the forgetting of those memories would cause them to fester inside him and come what may that rot would become anger and anger into violence. Schoolyard fights turned towards the cruel, even a blind and malefic rage. They came to fear the boy. Then he ran away to pour his hatred onto the world. Maybe they would come to forget him too in a few years.

She would have woken first to breaking glass, then woken her husband for them both to hear the slow, careful footsteps through the house coming closer. He met the boy in the hall with a flashlight while she dialed the police. Then the boy shot the husband and the wife fell over him, screaming and weeping and then the line went dead.

I picture the boy now a man having picked through the house before catching notice of the birthmark on the old woman’s wrist. I picture him studying his own and the memories creeping back like an illness. The whirling siren lights found him sitting on the porch steps of the dead house, watching them come as well as the sky, a mountainous sweep of cloud made burning white against the moon. Watching it, perhaps finding himself at the end of a search he never knew he was on to begin with.

Anything helps if you feel like throwing a few dollars my way. I sincerely appreciate the support.

Buy Me A Coffee

I think I’m writing this out of some sort of boredom. Not that anything I’ve been doing outside of this piece has been particularly boring. I’m just editing a lot, and always get that itch to work on something new. Also want to find another avenue to support other artists. Shout them out in posts like these other than just on the Notes section, or through a restack or comment. We need to keep talking about other artists, even if it was not through a review or critique specifically. They deserve it, and maybe this could help gain some exposure. Maybe even a reader might find the writer they really like. Substack goes in waves from dead go a little better – for the most part I think that might be a good thing. I’d hope a sense of some community through Substack along with the literature and works being spread around through this closer connection to other writers would do more than solely writing, like embodying more of what an artist is, and my interpretation of what that entails are stepping out of this hazy internet as often as you can. Sometimes it’s also other life demands, sometimes worse happenings. But we’ve got to keep talking, and I love rattling off like a madman.

With reading, I’ve been slow going with a few too many books at the same time. Made the mistake of making two of those rather large volumes. I’m still working my way through the Emily Dickinson biography by Sewall and Don Quixote. It’s been an oddly hectic few months so my reading time has been somewhat low, but life happens. Besides, in the overall, the writing is what’s most important. Eventually you have to put the book down and start writing.

Still, reading is important, so here are some thoughts. I’ve recently put Don Quixote on a bit of a pause to focus solely on the biography, save for a few smaller works – plays and such. I’m not too far in, just past their run-in with Cardenio. I have nothing bad to say about the book at all. It’s genuinely funny, and there’s only a few books out there that actually make me laugh. I’ve learned some things and have been gathering a lot of thoughts. Brock Eldon wants to know my thoughts, it being one of his favorites, so I might do that in another one of these when it’s finished. On the Dickinson biography: I’m really loving it. It’s a huge volume, 800 pages or something. It’s crammed full of details and letters and poems. I only just started the second volume, which is where the real story of Emily Dickinson begins. The first 300 or so pages was the build up, going into her family history, a chapter separated for each individual from her grandfather, her parents, siblings and other surrounding figures. I also have a collection of surviving letters – and there’s a ton – which I’ve been flipping through. Of course I’m always going through her poetry. All this is – besides her being a favorite – is to write a play based off her. First draft is already done, but I want to go even more research before I come back to it.

Her witty humor matches the likes of Dostoevsky and Shakespeare. The funniest I’ve found so far in the bio was a moment when there was an older but tiresome lady in her house asking about finding lodgings in Amherst, to which Emily apparently directed her: “To the cemetery,” to save the expenses of moving.

Besides that, I’ve learned some pretty glaring details regarding the family as a whole. Not once in all the research I’ve done online did I find information on The War Between the Houses. A term used for a family feud that lasted years before and after Emily died. The ‘Houses’ would be the Homestead, in which Emily and the majority of her family lived, and the Evergreens, a second house her father, Edward, had built to accommodate his son and Emily’s brother, Austin after his marriage to Susan Gilbert. Apparently the marriage was awful – toxic, as the kids today would say – and apparently Susan was the main instigator. It seems – to use another modern term – that Susan Gilbert, often portrayed as this innocent character, especially in regards to a possible romance between her and Emily, that she was actually quite a bitch. A lot of this comes from Mabel Todd, the woman whom Austin had a long-term affair, so the possibility of bias is important to note. But, through many letters, it wasn’t just Todd nor the Dickinson family making these claims, but practically the whole town. Alcoholic, hated children, hated Austin – apparently forced him to marry her but who really knows – a big spender forcing Austin to work exhausting hours just to keep up, and – as claimed by Emily’s sister, Lavinia, treated the poet so harshly it shortened her life by ten years. For fifteen years, Emily never even stepped foot into the Evergreens, and apparently for the last couple years of her life they were not on speaking terms. The ‘romance’ a lot of people pin on the two may have been much more one-sided than a lot of people suspect, and it may even be the case that Susan, seeing the potential for money in Emily’s poetry, may have started the rumor of the blighted romance between them.

Who knows. There’s a lot to read, but it makes you wonder why none of this – or what I could find – is left glaringly in the open for someone to find online. Almost makes you wonder at the bias of second-hand accounts trying to retell a poet’s life. But, NO, that could never happen online.

Still, there’s so little we really know about Susan. In her own letters to family, she has this cold demeanor. But it’s still only these flashes of who she really is/was. I don’t know if the biography is going to shift in bias towards how Susan has been framed so far. Whether it does or not is why I want to read more biographies, as well as to have a dialogue with the work. That’s something I’ve been developing the more I’ve read. Not easy – definitely in the beginning stages. I think it’s the next step to reading more books, especially for a long time. Dialogue with what one reads opens one up to a better form of freedom.

Other than all that, I’ve been trying to focus on more fiction floating around Substack. Fiction is what I want to be known for in the long run, and even if I know some fiction writers on the stack already, it’s only best that I branch out a little more. Essays are all well and good, some are amazing. But there’s some days where I don’t really care for them. A lot of them write about the same things, some just better than others, or with a different mask. Many of them approach problems, sometimes offering a solution, very little does it involve the work of creative fiction. Some of these essayists don’t seem to care for fiction/art, think – or have been poisoned to think – that it has little value. Others implore and search for great art and stress the need for it, wondering where all the great artists are. And if I want to be a great artist, I think it’s better to surround myself with the artists more than the complainers.

I’ll be doing the same for poems down the line as well now that I’ve decided to start doing this.

Of some memorable options: I read an older piece written by Stefan Baciu titled The Black Beam. Quite atmospheric, which is normal for Baciu’s work. This one is very gothic in tone, reads like an epic recounted to some council or village people, layered with a sense of history while adding in real historical references throughout. It’s worth checking out, even if it’s an older work.

Another I enjoyed was a story called Flightless by Lennox Tune. It wasn’t really a short story but more of an excerpt of a novella he’ll be releasing on September 7th. So keep an eye out for that. I enjoyed the read, especially the trippy feel in its beginning which I don’t really want to spoil. Tune is someone who stresses his desire to write in the Australian gothic, which I’m quite on board with from the name alone. He’s also a fan of McCarthy’s The Crossing, which is well and good in my book. It’s his consideration of his own nation and how that impacts his writing which I’m interested in most. It’s a topic on my own mind in regards to where I come from and - even better - since I’ve yet to really dive into Australian literature just yet, what a way to step into its world through reading a contemporary. This isn’t to say he has to do it through an auto-fictional lens. I want to see how this may impact his prose as well, and just what kind of story comes from his mind. But anyway, keep an eye out for his coming novella.

Other than that, not much else to say. Christian Chacon recently made a trip to the Cormac McCarthy archive and has been posting pieces of it through Notes. I’m hoping he’ll come out with a bigger piece on it detailing all he saw there. I, like anyone, love some artist lore, and who isn’t drooling to find out more about a writer that kept to himself. I know a lot of you will be buying that biography coming out when it does.

Guess some snippets on my projects couldn’t hurt. I wrote a short story I consider to be one in a handful of what I call groundwork stories before larger work comes out. I’ve been submitting it to some magazines but you’ll see it at some point. Things me and a few other Canadian writers are working on together as well as my attempts to try and ‘get out there’ locally, mingle with other artists for some plans I have for the future. But it’ll just make this post too long, and it’s already long enough to scare some people away. Novel’s still going strong. Nearing the end of this latest draft and will be sending it off for someone to read before I start another. Still set to come out next summer. Boy, does that feel like a long time away. The Dickinson play will probably become the main focus once the novel is truly finish – but I may come back to it with the time off from the novel. I also plan on banging out a few short stories with the extra time.

Considering some other news lately, I mostly want to thank a lot of people for the support they’ve given me. It’s nice that there’s at least a few people that read your stuff. Though there’s too many to catch, I’ve been loving what I’ve been reading. Can’t say I knew this many readers and writers before now. Then there are the friends I’ve made along the way. I still don’t know how I can fully express my gratitude – you know who you are.

Putting work out there changes you. Does anyone feel the same way? It affects what you’ll write next, makes you care more, create something that shows you worked on it. I might not have written some of the short stories I have and the novel most likely would not have come out the way it has or maybe even begun when it did. Still, I’m almost ashamed to say a lot of my short stories – save a few – is just me cracking my knuckles in preparation for the ‘bigger stuff.’ But everything comes with time.

Caught Shivering by the Night

Here now, dancing in the light
Halted like a taken hand
By the deep corridor night.

Barren – it must be barren
The doors clicked and closed
Darkness pressing from the cracks,
Toying – this baleful blight,
The hallway swathed in terrible night.

The tongue dries,
And teeth weigh like iron
Speaking to no one, while hands cover my eyes
Praying, whispering, petrified by darkness
That licked the night.

All growth is a leap in the dark.
- Henry Miller

The Bus

Early night of June 30^th. I’m finishing up a conversation with my taxi driver named Ali, telling me how they’ll always be better than Uber. I get to the station just in time for the gates to open for another bus ride down to New York to link up with some likeminded friends. Oh, and there’s another magazine launch party, and this time I have a couple poems in between the pages! I feel good about this trip – last one was a last-minute decision made on the cusp of being laid off of work for what would be a four-month stretch, but saying fuck it and going anyway to catch the Republic of Letters year running celebration. That time I had gone for an even shorter length of time than last, catching a few Z’s on Sudana's couch and linking up with the Non Grata crew before heading off to the basement bar to meet some new and glimmeringly familiar faces. Several moments of staring down the barrel of homelessness later, I take another trip to Atlanta for the Masculine release party. But, you know, it’s worth it, meeting these people and being inspired in some way by their insight and their relatability. Money is a cliché anyway, why let it hang such a heavy shadow over your head? Now I’m back at work and have about three hundred dollars in United States cash I’ll be using to survive the Big Apple, and, this time, I’ll have a friend from more familiar grounds coming with me.

But first I have to board the bus. 7am, my usual bedtime. I’m getting ready for whoever I may be sitting beside as I climb aboard. You’d understand why I might be dreading it, what with my first experience busing to New York leading me to sitting most of the ride beside a friendly but old woman that stank of piss.

I count ahead to the 9^th row where my seat awaits and, slowly, come to see a little old lady wearing a black beret up the isle. She smiles and I smile back, stepping up to tell her it looks like we’ll be sharing seats for a bit. As she gets up, I ask if her if she would prefer the window seat, but she insists I take it.

So I do, kicking my bag under the seat and arming myself with a few chocolate bars to last the journey. I figured my seatmate wouldn’t say much most of the night like the other times, but she quickly informs me this was her first long bus ride across the border. Coming all the way from Halifax where she lives with her son, having flown to Toronto to catch a bus to Boston for a friend’s sudden funeral and finding this happened to be the fastest route. She tells me she will stay with another son of hers in Boston – to then go on to Florida and stay with yet another son. We introduced ourselves. Her name is Lynn.

“Will you be getting off somewhere in Rochester or Seneca?” I ask her. Turns out she’s sitting with me all the way down to Newark then up to Boston, and here I am worried about my hips. I ask again if she’d like the window seat, that she could use it to sleep. But she was quite insistent I keep it, soft-spoken and kind and telling me she can just sleep with her head down, laughing when she tucks her head in like a garden gnome.

“So, Boston?” I remember asking. Only been there once and a beautiful city it is. She couldn’t remember how often she had been there herself. Said she drove lots of the east coast back when she was younger.

“For work?” I asked her.

“Work, travel, weddings.” Told me the thing she missed most about driving was getting somewhere on her own time. Said it took almost five hours to get from Montreal to Boston, but back in the day she could do it in three.

“Real demon on the road,” I told her.

“Should have seen my kids faces when they saw how fast I could go.”

“You have many of those?”

“Four,” she told me. One girl, plenty of boys, two sisters, a brother, on and on.

“Big family,” I added. She would show me pictures of them later on her phone like I was on her couch having milk and cookies, watching her flip pages in a photo album.

“You too?”

“Quite a few.”

“Family’s everything,” she told me later on nearing the end of our trip.

Lynn tells me what she and her family do. Blessedly, Lynn’s retired. Conveniently, she happened to edit books. Medical and academic papers, working with teams for various chapters for medical and science institutions, critiquing and advising as you go. A real process requiring tight efficiency matching even the most observant novelist. I ask if she’s ever written something by herself, novel or study, but she had not. So I equate her work with something like the sculptor Rodin, working with assistants to see his work come to fruition.

“I love Rodin,” Lynn told me.

“Saw a piece of his in the Boston Fine Arts.” Showed her a picture – which was about as much as I wanted to touch my phone for this bus ride – of a leaning Psyche chiseled out of unpolished marble cloaked by a wall of her hair. You could see the teeth marks in the stone. Told me she’d like to see it and might go to the museum if she has time.

Back to her kids. Well, I can’t even remember all the details. Surgeon, neuroscientist, a lawyer, a son-in-law working as a Canadian diplomat, a granddaughter working as a proofreader, planning a visit to their home village in Ghana together. “Bet you’re proud,” I tell her.

“They work hard,” she told me. “But they’re honest. That’s what it takes. And we stay together, even if we’re far.” Then it was her turn for a few questions, starting with what I do. Told her I write when I’m not busy working a real job to pay the bills. Told her the trades lead you to meet some interesting people and gave her a few stories of a few individuals I met. One guy, a newbuild supervisor, was missing from site, and I go looking for him at a few of the empty houses down the road. I go upstairs and find him flat on his back on the carpet, red faced and eyes appearing ready to burst from their sockets. So, I think he’s dead. Turns out he’s fine! “Feels good on my back,” he says, a look on his face like he just put his finger in a toaster. Lynn laughed at that. She had a soft, good laugh.

I stood in line with Lynn as we pulled through customs. Some kids were coming by through another door drunk off their minds and she wondered where they were coming from. Told her it was the same bridge we just crossed on the bus, that they walked over.

“Why would they do such a thing?”

“They must have been partying in Niagara,” is what I said. “Lots of people do it.”

“Have you?” I gave her a quick rundown of a long drunken night with a few friendly faces down the glowing tourist streets, adding in a story of losing forty bucks at the casino, but was never much of a gambler anyway. That got her laughing again.

She later asked about my writing as we pulled away from the crossing. After my own heart, eh, Lynn? But I don’t want to bore her, or overwhelm, and I feel that way quite often about anyone that asks. I tread the usual line of this and that, poetry and essays, a book here and there. But she asks me about it, for details, I see her thinking as she speaks.

“You think about this quite a lot,” she said when I was finished. I could say ‘if only she really knew,’ but I think she did. Said I’ve done it a long time and it’s all I’m really good at, so she told me to keep at it. Adding not many can go around faking being good at something and stay happy.

Between talking about family and friends and New York were a few spaces of sleep. By now I was getting used to the bus and would thankfully doze off in short bursts, waking when I’d hear someone in the back shout at nothing or the bus driver yell at one of the passengers. My eyes would flutter open and I’d see just a few stars, the shape of mountains. Sometimes I’d wake and see her sleeping too. Other times we’d wake up together and start talking as if our last never ended.

Half the time we would people-watch. A drunk man I met at the Buffalo station reeking of beer that I never got the name of eventually joined us. He would fall asleep on the floor a few times and our bus driver was never quite thrilled – even threatened the cops a few times. A can of his fell from his pocket and rolled to my feet.

“Want a swig of this?” I asked Lynn, but she laughed and shook her head and looked around like she couldn’t believe where she was. I tossed the can on an empty seat behind me and looked back later to see it was gone.

At some point, a couple sitting in front of us got off in Buffalo. Hours later in Ithaca, stopped outside a superstore, that same couple climbed back on to grab a bag they had forgotten. Lynn was watching them, bit perplexed. Told her they had gotten off earlier while she was sleeping and we both wondered how they tracked the bus down and from where. Afterward they wandered off into the dark and were gone. Quiet little city, somewhere between one and three in the morning. A few windows glowing yellow, but the city’s shift-punchers aren’t quite awake yet.

People that walk up and down a bus don’t often consider their surroundings. Sure, bumpy ride, but you could at least say sorry when you nudge into someone as one individual with a ‘ALL GAME’ graffiti style tattoo on their neck came leering by to elbow Lynn in the head. I could only feel bad seeing the way she held her head after, offering for a third time if she would like my seat. Again, she said no. After, Lynn said she was having a fun time on the bus, that it was on a bucket list for a long time, though doubted she would ever do it again.

A few more hours and some on and off sleep, we notice the sun was nearing its rise over the hills and Lynn announced we were half an hour out from Newark. We enjoyed most of the way in silence. Tired, maybe sorting through what else there was needed to be said. I decide to ask her what’s the most important thing she’s learned in life. She thought about it for a second, dark eyes far, nowhere near the bus. Told me to be kind to people like you love them, that it will change your life. She said it could end so soon, mentioned a young woman she knew, twenty-two, dying of a heart attack. “It could just end,” said Lynn. “You don’t want to live your last moment angry about something.”

We see glimmers of Manhattan against the bright coin of the sun. Penn Station awaits. I want to smile, but keep it hidden in place of a soft grin so I don’t look manic after a long bus ride. Slowly crawling to her stop, our bus driver blaring away on the horn even on a red light, we pull to the side and Lynn grabs her bag from under the seat as everyone rises to leave. I’m watching the people and elbows around her in case they try to muscle past this little old lady, but they wait their turn. She calls me dear, smiles, says we’ll meet again. I can only muster a take care and watch her shamble off the bus. My final snapshot of Lynn is her drifting into the station with her head high, on her way to see a friend one last time, gone between the crowds gathering there while I sit back, have a chocolate bar for breakfast and go my own way.

The City

I step off the bus down the road from Madison Square and breathe that fresh New York air. I smell like a bus and quickly set off to grab a bagel before finding my hotel. It’s about 8am, so I’m not expecting them to let me into my room just yet, but they hold my backpack so I can do a little exploring. Never really wandered Midtown before save my first time here to catch the bus at 5am, so to see it during the day when the heartbeat is really going was quite the change. I take 7^th Ave and just walk, slipping through crowds, catching specks of conversations here and there and sucking in every storefront, every tattoo and style of clothing passing me by. I’m sweating the entire way, feeling every bead, a forewarning how I’ll feel for most of this trip every time I step outdoors.

Around Times Square I make quick work dodging the Minnie Mouse mascots and giant gorilla costumes, looking up at the jumbotrons trying to gather how many times I’ve seen this scenery in the movies, how much smaller and larger it feels at the same time. But I’m quickly distracted by the Central Park tree line and zip over. Never realized how full the park is, nor did I expect how quiet it would become when I stepped from under the cover of all those high rises to the trees. I marvel all the weaving trails; baseball diamonds and the rock formations people climb with chalked hands. I don’t go too far, deciding to take a seat at one of the benches when I reach a bronze statue of Shakespeare and enjoy the scenery: the Bard standing tall with a background of motionless leaves, endless sorts of people passing by, coffees in their hands, pushing strollers, couples going arm in arm, the squirrels that crawl concerningly close to the point I think they’re the famous critters that tend to attack unsuspecting folks – but when they see I don’t have food they quickly scurry off.

I’m exhausted, end up spending more than an hour sitting beneath Shakespeare and periodically nodding off. I don’t think it’s just the little sleep I’ve had on the way here – really, the year so far has given me a lot of reasons to make the eyes heavy. Non-stop work, non-stop people, very little breathing room in between. But it’s like that for everyone, isn’t it? Why does it seem the very fabric of the world tries to break you when you go your own way? Not long before this trip, I was out in the Algonquin woods – talk about a 180 – in which I climbed and nearly fell off a cliff in a weird delirium when aspects of obsession reared it at times ugly face my way. I made it, obviously, and might still be recovering from a little bitterness. Following – becoming – who you really are can hurt, and the knife only digs deeper the further you go, that’s why you make the part of ‘who you really are’ possible by having no other option left to go back to, and so you stubbornly journey on. I’m not free, exactly, but I’m the closest I’ve ever been. You’ve got to ask yourself at some point as an artist if you would turn back or not, and what that really means if you keep going. I look at Shakespeare again, think of the last time I thought of Hamlet, the moment between the Prince of Denmark and his friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern proceeding the Mousetrap.

You would play upon me, you would seek to know my stops… Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.

With the play on my mind, I think of the world that tries to break those that live for themselves, think most of the people who are afraid of freedom, more so afraid of to see it in others because of how little they have it in themselves and think they see you through and through, have you settled in a box and struck dumb to how translucent they really are. They don’t understand that it’s not all about creating art exactly - but going out into the world assured of yourself as a person.

With a spike of energy thanks to my bench nap, I rush back to Penn Station to meet with Adam Hunter just as he arrives. We get our bags and our room and rush off to see some more of the city. At least, lead him up Times Square again where the bustle is getting thicker, catch a train – by the way, I’m really starting to catch on to the subway system, if I may say so – to walk around the Strand bookstore and salivate over all the literature crammed into their shelves. Back at Times Square, Adam sees a giant hotdog and we both observe the mascots, the scammers and the snapped pictures and says: “This is America.”

Back at the hotel, both of us realizing we stink, we quickly clean up before heading off to catch a Gasda play. We talk about books and our own writing, what we’re doing to get better, what we’re planning for the future. We talk about the books we brought with us to read and Adam mentions, amazingly, that he read somewhere around a hundred books the year before. I think of my 35 in the same year, not that I’m totally envious of it – reading shouldn’t be a numbers game anyway - but he’s certainly earned more respect from me. The bar hosting the play is a sweet set up, bright white tiles leading to a backroom where the stage is set, about 40 people attending to see The Quartet. Good play, amazing to see in person. It’s funny and dark – a very domestic play in which our quartet begin the opening scene preparing for an orgy, continuing on with the repercussions afterward. Brilliantly acted, its best scenes being the arguments between its characters. I found the facial expressions of the actors in its most quiet moments to be its highlight. Theatre is an experience, and this play would not have been as powerful for me if I had simply read it. I’m grateful to Adam for telling me about it.

But the night wasn’t over. So happens me and Adam got to run into James Tussing and Chris Marino at the play. Faces I had remembered from past Non Grata events but hadn’t quite linked up with them yet. But we go get drinks and chat for a little while. My talk with Marino ranged in a dozen juicy topics, from writing, our backgrounds, and even God – bible stories, belief, doubt, temptation and hardships. These kinds of discussions, even for a guy that’s never really settled on an answer, are what I live for. I remember him asking me somewhere along the lines of how life changes for me on the days I don’t believe – this is after I tell him I don’t think I’ll decide on one thing, and even surprise him by mentioning even Dostoevsky doubted to his dying day. I tell him, after a few digressions, that whether you believe or not, following the Shepherd’s teachings isn’t that bad of a life. But, hey, you’re talking to a guy that slips into de Sade levels of cynicism some days, so let’s not dwell on this too long.

Eventually Chris has to head off and me and Adam are alone with Tussing, chatting and getting his thoughts on Canadian literature, a topic on my mind for quite a while now. Wondering what could be made of the True North identity in its art, agreeing it’s not so easy to define, what with its vast empty regions of peoples from mountains to coasts to cornfields to forests. I’m back and forth on it.

But it’s getting late and me and Adam head back to the hotel. We get to 8^th Ave and watch the lights of Manhattan at night before reaching our room somewhere around 1am. We quickly try to catch some much-needed sleep.

Anyway, I’m up a few hours later, Adam seemingly waking up at the same time as me. I read for a little while as he dozes off again, write in my notes and eventually do my morning push ups and slip off early to get to the Met while he’s still asleep. We can cut to the chase here to when I’m wondering its halls, having survived a train ride I almost got lost on and was nearly swindled by a food vendor. Here, I drown in culture for a dozen hours to the point it was almost overwhelming, feeling the same pressure in my skull one feels when they’ve read a good book all day. Of all the precious works I had the pleasure to marvel at, it was the sculptures that kept bringing me back. Roman and Greek sculpture is wonderful, yeah, and I wandered those halls a good while to appreciate the Hercules’ and Aphrodite’s – but I had seen much of the same craftmanship at the Boston of Fine Arts museum nearly a year ago. But when I entered the European sculpture collection, I considered Adam lucky he ever saw me again. Marble, bronze, Ugolino and his Sons, The Burghers of Calais, a striking bronze sculpture of a woman in a shawl called Winter. I went back to stare at Ugolino three times, taking photo after photo, videos trying to take in every detail, stared until my eyes hurt.

Sculpture has always fascinated me. I’ve told myself for years if I was not a writer, I would be a sculptor. Michelangelo hated painting, funny enough, considering it, or anything outside sculpture, to be inferior to carving stone. I almost agree with him. There’s something in sculpture that’s so pure in its artistic merit. The skill, the patience, the exalting labor more strenuous than banging away at a typewriter. I look up at Ugolino and his Sons and want nothing more but to touch it, every definition from the fingers in his teeth to his clenched toes. Just being so close to it gave me a jolt I’ve experienced only a few times viewing art. I’m not sure I can even define it. I think it’s the labor of creating something so great is why I find sculpture so fascinating, the sweat and toil it demands. This is the suffering for one’s art I can get behind. To work so hard at something, whether it be stone, a painting or writing longhand, to push past the carpal tunnel and fatigue and rewrite page after page, to really push yourself for it. Art requires suffering, but it doesn’t mean we all have to suffer. For an artist, to suffer is almost a guarantee, but we shouldn’t go out of our way to earn it just to write a novel. But to push yourself through strenuous work, go through the months and years of doubt but in the end creating something you know is good – that’s honorable suffering, that’s when you know the work was worth it.

But would you look at the time, I’ve got a party to get to. I reluctantly leave behind all the artwork that still rings in my head as I write this and slip outside. I cut through the park, taking my time to reach the A train to enjoy the scenery for what will be my last glimpse while I’m here and make it back to the hotel to meet up with Adam and get cleaned up once again. Then it’s off to Brooklyn to meet up with Marigold and Liam before the Non Grata event. This is my fourth time coming face to face with Marigold with months in between, often only meeting for a few dozen hours at a time but its as easy to talk to him as if I only saw him the week before. We rattle off on the usual topics: our books in progress, the magazine, some writing projects I have in mind. Adam falls into conversation with Liam just as easily and I hand the latter a book of essays by Miller he had lent me in December. We end up slipping off to the party, each of us carrying a box of magazines while Adam polishes off a bottle of wine on the journey.

We march along with boxes in our arms, swerving from Williamsburg to the subway to East Village, sweating all the way. We chat about Substack happenings, the future, books and our respective countries. Nothing too good to look forward to on that last part for both sides, but whatever, this is a transition period and the people screaming to high heaven over the death of the world usually do because it’s their world being left to the wayside. Before long we make it to the Bowery Palace, getting a quick rundown from Liam about what the place even is before we get inside. Cool stage and dancefloor, but I was digging the red wallpaper and the lighting a lot more.

Not long into setting the table, the music starts and that’s about as much hearing as I’ll have for the night, prepping myself to summon the old bouncer voice. Jokes aside, people come trickling in, a lot of new faces, dozens I won’t even remember by the time the night is over save a few. Even Tussing and Marino show up for a little while - long time no see. And who do we have waltzing in through the door but Alex Muka himself grabbing a drink as soon as he can. I introduce him to Adam and trail off for a bit while they talk about beer, which is the best brew and all that jazz. I don’t get what they’re really trying to say anyway – piss is piss. Either way it’s always nice to see the hungover writer, and was glad to hear his family is doing good. Muka is someone that likes to work with his hands like me. He writes longhand, and good for him, that shit activates every lobe in the brain so you can’t kid him that it’s light work. Before long, Lily shows up. Never have anything bad to say about her. Turns out she’s been taking a bit of a hiatus from writing but in the course of the night she told me about a piece she’s been working on that I won’t spoil but would like to see. She brought some friends with her, and I hate to say I forget their names, but they were cool to click with, throw questions at and catch some of their own. One man with a South African accent asks some pretty strong questions in the literary range. The best was wondering why I would be reading a Jean Genet book at 7am with a bit of a hangover.

I come to know a dozen more names, people I’ve linked up with and will be looking for the next I come to the Big Apple. Throughout the night, the talking never ends, topics ranging from catch up to country to literature, music, history and stories. I don’t always get to talk about some of these things. Speaking with likeminded people is a bit of a reassurance, people who are, in some ways, wired similarly to myself.

The night lasts for hours. Forget staying up past my bedtime, once last call is made I realize I’m usually just getting up around this time. But I stay until the last second as the crowd begins to drift and doors are getting anxious to close. By the end of it, Muka having performed an Irish goodbye and Lily slipping away about as fatigued as me and Adam after our bus trips, all that remains is me, my fellow Canadian and Marigold. We each take a box of the remaining magazines to help Marigold on the way to his place. Of course, I make sure to steal a couple copies for myself and let Marigold know so he can deduct the expenses. Couple people back home want to see my poems, and Borges was an advocate for stealing books, so when has there ever been a better time?

Along the way – the streets getting a little quiet – homeless now drifting about and a couple making out by some scaffolding, we get into talk of the institutions that are more likely to smack a great big ‘NO’ sticker on a writer’s face without even reading their material over what Marigold wants to do. He highlights how the institutions have led us here while also destroying themselves all to make a quick buck, all to hold onto a system of values inevitably slipping away towards a new time and people. When I wonder what ‘here’ is I think of this weird state of the world we are all in, beyond but not excluding the death of reading and the soiling of art. Deep down, something is wrong, deeper than corrupted values or maliciousness by an institution or official or entity and it is that thing that is contributing to the death of these institutions and so much more, whether it be our spirit, our critical thinking, our democracy, civilization, family units, friendships or romances. I tell Marigold I’m optimistic: “while these institutions are destroying themselves, we’re the ones doing the work.” So what is it we’re doing, each and every one? Creating art, each in our own way for our own purposes, ultimately we are giving art another pulse that will outlive us, and art, I believe, will save us all. There is a forking path ahead, and those who hold the reins of what should and shouldn’t be desperately pull back for what is ‘safe’ and ‘secure,’ even while it falls apart, because in truth it is a dark path ahead, and its elusiveness terrifies most, are made deafened by their fear and unable to fathom that most steps forward are a shot in the dark. I can’t tell you how many times in these almost two years where I just ‘went ahead with it,’ and I’ve never been closer to the life I want to live because of that. This goes beyond even the creation of art and in every way has everything to do with art, because to be an artist is not merely to type a word or paint a canvas but to live and embody it through the mind and the body, the soul, friendships, relationships, or the way one works to the way one lies back under the trees and does nothing. Facing that forking path – the one that leads us truly onward as opposed to that which leads to a repression of all that we are which will once again build up to an explosion of death – art will be the torch that lights the way ahead. The transition will be painful, there is nothing to preserve, because preserving the old foundations will simply make the water tepid. It must flow, and with flow the old ways will drift and sink, and at least then we can see another sunrise for a little while longer.

Marigold gets to his place and we give a parting farewell. The sun is scheduled to rise a couple hours from now and so me and Adam head on back to the hotel. He quickly collapses onto his bed and is out cold. I lay down and close my eyes. I’m awake an hour and a half later and hop out of bed while Adam snores away so I can pack my things and run off to grab another bagel before my bus arrives. Quite the ride to get back, big tough woman taking the wheel, gets pissed at people for taking two minutes to climb back onto the bus after honking the horn that it’s time to leave the pitstops we’re at. At one point she puts her foot on the gas to scare everyone outside that she’s serious while the people in the bus still haven’t found their seats. An old Spanish lady that will come to sit beside me later falls to the floor and I bend the cover of my book trying to keep my feet. Good God.

Back Home

Can’t catch a wink on this ride. Too many people shouting in their inside voices about the domestic abuse they’ve suffered and committed. But I get home eventually, hop the border without a problem and get back to Toronto by dark. A friend is there to pick me up and we have a long chat. I’m tired but very little do I feel so natural talking with a friend, so free of ambition as I listen to everything they have to say about their own future. I hardly even think of my trip after giving them the initial rundown – half the reason being my voice was hardly working by then but you know – instead I feel this joyous sensation of being very present.

But when I get home, the weight of late nights gets a little heavier. I get to bed as soon as I can, sleep like a rock until the next morning. By then it’s Monday, but luckily I have a holiday. I don’t look at my phone and barely glance at the clock before I get up, a bit groggy and sore in a lot of places but I go and write anyway. Bang out a short story for the Bad Clown Books submission call and work on my novel for a few hours in a state Muka described as being ‘in the trenches.’ Finishing up, I head outside, observe the trees and the blue sky as a welcome change from all those skyscrapers, study the green leaves like it’s been months since I’ve laid eyes on them. Still exhausted, have things to do, people to see, but my head swims and I get a feeling of lightness at having worked as hard as I just did – because, if I’m not working my day job, what’s more relaxing than doing something you like? The work and the rest beneath the trees afterward feels like a breath of fresh air and, for a moment which will fade away in a few days or a few hours but never stay away forever, I feel very alive.

Lapping At the Shore

It could really be so sweeping
So rapid as blinking
Clear a moment, until suddenly I am slipping.

What paths were clear
Then lost in the dust,
But in halted footfalls all is hush,
The sweeping down of an angel,
Then none.

Couple heartbeats more,
For has not this season
Come and gone before?
Dreams quaking, the clouds all breaking
While here you lie, trembling, teeth shaking.

But the days can keep counting
Just a little more.
See! dashing wings slip up to heaven
The crows giggling – feathers spinning to the floor,
While the tree shade thickens,
Even rain – leaf-drums singing – sinks in the waves
Lapping at the shore.

Introduction

His reality suddenly shattered, Hayden considers his place with nowhere else to go.

There came an early snowfall in the fire of autumn – the morning bright and the sky cloudless come sunrise, their room bright and them clinging to the other beneath the warm covers. They never left the house that day. Lights off, curtains drawn to watch the eve grow darker together. Sharing each night for somewhere around a year now, a time filled mostly with each other, with friends and little family. They would play a movie as night swept over, a few glasses of wine between chatter of everything.

Hungry, they careened into the kitchen to whip up a meal. Music leapt with the sizzle of a pan, gliding and slipping around one another with touches – a hand on one’s hip, arms, fingers light on the back of their necks. In their blind joy, he had spilt their meal onto the burner and lapped it up with a cloth, still laughing, feeling no change to the air of their night.

“Babe.”

Something different in that voice. He would never have expected a fist to the teeth when he turned.

“Let me do it,” shoving him aside to take the pan.

He wondered if it had really happened, drunk as he was, but the pain of his lip that would soon swell was a sharp reminder that it had.

“Why did you do that?”

“You were being stupid.”

There was little more laughing that night, even the walls of their house seemed to notice.

Not much was said of it. He never told his friends, knowing what they would say. Leave, run, she doesn’t deserve you. But it wasn’t so easy. Where else was there to go when all other kin had been shunned from the confused hatred of growing up? She had been there for him and he for her in a time when they had never felt more alone.

They met swathed in blacklight. Always a glance, her from the bar and he the door, for a while seeming like there was always a space between them, thinking whatever they had would forever remain afar.

In those days, each night melded into the darkness of the last. Boredom exploded into discord. He would bleed for a cheque and she would ice his split cheek where a head had cracked against his, but on nights to come when they were alone she would embrace the trembling from his bones.

He never considered she could be one to raise a fist against him. He was head over heels, devoted as a dog, you might say. For a long time they had been running from fists of their own – for her a father, for him a mother. The hatred they fled with bruises to go with it was one that could seep into their being, indeed Hayden’s roiled inside him like some storm on the horizon. At times it would burst with a snap, a bang against the wall, or he’d let it fester, turn his blood into poison as all that hatred poured onto himself. But he never hit her.

She thought the same – that she would never be one to grow into such a habit. But hatred was deep in her breast as much as she might deny it – as much as she might try to rationalize, dissect and point blame at anyone else but herself in some conclusion that they had deserved her loathing. She expected it from Hayden, treated the thought like it was bound to happen, that his bursts of self-hatred would one day turn onto her and she would feel those fists the walls knew so well. But time passed and his touch was soft, firm where it needed to be in the flesh, but gentle. Paranoia set in, doubts upon doubts and reasonings that it was destined to happen, that somehow she might deserve it or – worse yet – did not deserve it at all and was little more than a body floating through a fate of pain and confusion and entrapment. But he never hit her. Over time – though she may never realize it – she began to grow tired of waiting, outright impatient, fearing and expecting the monster with such earnestness that one wouldn’t be surprised that the monster began to stir within her, and to fulfil her expectations, perhaps prove her theory, she would have to trip the wire herself and goad what she knew Hayden was deep down inside.

Months passed. They threw a party. Friends from both sides attending. Drinking, voices and music. She was drunk and he helped her to bed when the house was emptied and the worst of the mess was cleaned. She lay there while he undressed and was crawling into bed when light exploded across his eyes.

To the floor he went, his wrist bending back with a piercing stab. He tried to get up but her palm smacked him across the eyes. He lay blinking through the murky dark to see her rise and what he saw of the ceiling was spinning, drunkenness turning to nausea and the floor cold on his back.

“Get up,” she said. “You’re acting like a baby.” Then she rolled back across the bed.

He did not follow. He nursed his swelling eye and cheek. In the dark he could feel the scars on his hands and he remembered when they were fresh and raw, glassed by a belligerent with a grudge for a crime Hayden did not know he had committed.

“These will scar,” she told him that night, wiping them with a wet cloth. They sat by the window of his old apartment, the city stretching on into the black wall of night. It was the first time she had come home with him, insisting after the attack. She kissed his hands and they locked eyes in a silence harrowed by the city’s drone, two leaning and battered sculptures.

Where else could he go at this point in his life? He wasn’t on the streets, he wasn’t alone, and it was easy to remember the good times. Why not put up with her if she acted like a cunt once in a while? When he was sure she was asleep, he rose and crawled into bed. She rolled over and wrapped him in her arms, saying nothing, breath sliding back into the rhythm of sleep.

Her hold was soft, his eyes growing heavy watching the shadows of the room, knowing deep down that he should not be there but staying there anyway, the night melding into the darkness of the last.

If you feel like pitching in to help me keep this going, anything helps. Got big things on the way so need as many pick-me-up’s as I can get.

Buy Me A Coffee

I wouldn’t call this much of a review, more so an overview of each of the stories in this collection. I mainly go over the basic plot while trying to avoid spoilers and what I liked as well as general thoughts. I feel more comfortable diving into and dissecting full books rather than short stories, which wouldn’t give me as much to work with. So, while I might not be digging in a way the writers of these stories are looking for, I’m hoping they can use this piece to perhaps promote their stories to any potential readers. Likewise if there are readers out there who are hesitant on buying this collection, or have not poured through it yet, or even if you’re just passing by and have discovered this book for the first time, maybe you’ll find a story that sounds up your alley.

Enjoy.

June 13th. I’m walking down Euclid Ave to reach the Bad Clown Books release party for a collection of short stories called Masculine. I’ve been vaguely aware of the collection being promoted on the stack, but for the most part I lost it to the algorithm and was distracted by other matters. But I started to catch wind of some writers I know and respect being in the collection, and put it on my list of books to read. Lo and behold, so happens Bad Clown put up a contest, rewarding a free book to anyone that restacks their post. And I won! So, with the book on hand and my bank balance taking a sigh of relief, I told myself I was going to read the collection no matter what.

Then Trey Hinkle (R. A. Hinkle) announces a release party three weeks from the day.

Now, hard times we all live in, maybe not the smartest decision to spend the money I’m barely holding onto for a last minute trip to Atlanta with no real plan of what I’ll be doing other than going to the party. Especially since I was laid off at the time. But for the past year I’ve learned to trust myself and just go with things, which is the reason, in a lot of ways, why most of you might end up reading this and anything else I’ve written. Who needs a plan? And, funny to say, I was able to book a hotel with some points I got to steal from someone I know, and I never even knew what a Four Seasons was to begin with! Talk about a good time, though I felt out of place. I thought it would be a Marriott or something like a motel with a few floors, which is most of what I’m used to. Color me surprised when I saw the swan shaped towel on my bed.

So I’m in Atlanta, enjoying southern made grits and cornbread for the first time, wandering the winding roads a lot of people told me I couldn’t really walk through. True enough, but I’m on a budget, so walking it is. So here I am coming down Euclid Ave with my shirt off and a backpack hanging from my shoulders. The heat is sweltering and humid and I can feel every coursing bead. I don’t want to get my shirt all filthy before the party and decided this was the best way to go. Besides, I’m working on a tan.

As I’m coming up, I run into another man a block ahead of me who stopped to take off his own shirt. I walk past and tell him he’s got the right idea. He tags along and we get to talking, learn his name is Patrick and when he finds out I’m Canadian, he wonders if I’m here for Fifa.

“Fifa?”

“The soccer game,” he says.

“Oh, I didn’t know that was happening. That’s cool. Why would someone come to Atlanta for Fifa?”

He takes out a half-burnt joint and lights it up. I can’t tell if he’s looking at me like I’m crazy or not. “It’s playing here.”

“No wonder there’s all the jerseys,” I say.

“What brings you here?”

“I’m going to a book release party,” I say. “I’m a writer.”

“Right on, man.”

I ask him about the neighborhood of Euclid Ave. He tells me it’s his preferred place to be. Not too flashy or full of models living in condos kind of deal. Fills me in that he was born here but lived in Texas most of his life, that he’s been back for a year and still wondering if he’s staying, expressing that familiar concern of being too close to family for comfort yet knowing anywhere else is too far away. Asks me what it’s like in Canada and I tell him it’s getting hot and add that today in Atlanta - temped up to the 30’s - is actually not as bad as our hottest day in the Southern Ontario wetlands. He asks me why I don’t have an accent and I tell him those are just the hosers and the Mounties. He thinks about it for a little while and points out a store he needs to slip into while the bar for the release party is just a few doors behind me. We exchange fist bumps and a take care. I pull on my shirt and head inside, expecting the Bad Clown crew to already be there but turns out I’m the first one. I only have to wait a few minutes before Ricardo shows up but he’s taking care of the rest of that story.

Off the bat it is a well made book. Good cover, good paper. The design itself really stands out and I can see a lot of people judging a book by its cover being tempted to pick this one up for the look of it alone. It has a sinister vibe, but dancelike at the same time. You can interpret it in so many ways. You could see two men in some sort of struggle, or perhaps the older man further to the right is pushing the younger one, and at the same time you see his hands moving as if to save the young man from falling. Yet, he always has this odd sneer that you can’t really forget.

The topic of Masculine is what interests me most. The collection is focused on the idea of masculinity explored most often through the working class. These stories follow a range of subjects, most often hovering over the question of what it means to be a man whether that’s as a father, husband, even a son. They explore faith, familial relationships, loss, love, friendship, maturity and so much more. It’s sad to say that a lot of the people I’ve mentioned this collection to back home have either rolled their eyes to the name or grew an infuriating awkwardness to their tone of voice. Programming will have their minds instantly moving to every negative attribute to being a man, will assume that these stories are just some kind of hype-masculine, broy sort of narrative that has guns and bombs and drinking and conquered women. I can’t really help them because just in speaking the title alone I’ve already been put into a box in their heads and to them the collection is valueless.

But I don’t think it is. Masculine isn’t the first collection to explore the themes it does, but it’s an important topic nonetheless and should not be allowed to end. Stories of what it is to be a man aren’t trash not worth considering and I give props to Bad Clown Books for taking this on. What makes Masculine a great collection is that it’s a collection putting the work of multiple writers together, who all - in their own way - express the same thoughts, doubts and ponderings that all together sum up a human experience.

But it’s not all limited to men. Some of these stories take place from the eyes of women, and some of the stories are written by the same. The point here is that the stories try and approach the theme of masculinity as a whole, how it is seen, viewed and considered from the perspectives of as many people the collection could fit.

But most of you are here to check out the review, so head on down below and check that out.

The Stainless Steel Hubcap Principle
by J. M. Son

A story following a kid working with his father as a junk picker. The kid seems to be used to this sort of work, doing the jobs that are easier for his smaller, nimble frame. Though he’s still a kid, and is subjected to making the little mistakes a kid will often make. Unfortunately in a blue-collar job, his mistakes risk causing his father to snap at him, quite a normal reaction for people in the trades, whether their outburst be against a coworker or their own kid.

I like how the boy sees and describes the world around him. It’s more innocent than anything, goofy in a little kid sort of way. The boy has sparkles of imagination woven through the text that the father seems always to be pressing a boot onto.

Les Cenizas
by LaTesha Harris

Story of a young college student named Stewart Barton, suffering from addiction while living under the demands of his senator father, who seems to care more about his career in politics than his own son to the point Stewart even has a handler that supplies him with what he needs. The story takes place in a somewhat non-linear form revealing to us the circumstances of the overdose of a girl and fellow student named Celeste.

Line I liked:

Sunset stole in through the window and turned her gold.

I Never Liked Men
by Silva Fonseca

Opening drags me right in. The story is more of a rumination rather than a grounded narrative following the narrator from point A to B. It’s a deep dive into what masculinity is to the character we spend our time swimming through the thoughts of. At times it reads very analytical, dissecting and piecing together what exactly that word means and allows itself to go down deep avenues beyond a surface level of what some may claim masculinity to be. There’s a part where the narrator refers to men or masculinity as noise filling a room, a passage I won’t show here as I find it to be a better read when you are pulled into it by Fonseca’s writing.

Black Coffee
by T. E. Cole

A short read in which our narrator suffers through dementia. Being so short, I don’t want to go into all the details but with the subject matter it’s easy to say it was quite heartbreaking to read. Whether you could say this is true or not to how a person suffering from dementia actually goes through, it’s the feeling and confusion Cole touches on that makes it impactful.

Barbed Wire Fence Blues
by Bob Graham

This story shows us a character working as a farmhand, a job he desperately tried avoiding to take up despite living so remotely that it’s really the only option for him if he wants to stick around. I loved it for its depiction of straight up hard work that most people living in the real world have to do, as well as the images of the Alberta prairies I haven’t seen in years that would flash through my head. The kind of people our narrator interacts with – his boss, a coworker – screams of the usual trades folk I rub elbows with on a daily basis with an ending passage that I loved which will send me over to the rest of Graham’s work for more.

Death in the Gulley
by E. L. Jacobs

A come-of-age story between a group of boys running into an instance in which a decision must be made. I liked this story for the sense of history already standing between these boys. They’ve been friends a long time, what would be long at their age. The story is like a right of passage, meaning what the boys are made or take upon themselves to do is something that will live with them for the rest of their lives, with the last passage hinting at their change. I’m a bit of a sucker for coming-of-age stories, but if I need to pry into this, I also enjoyed how distinct each character appears from the other. Some are brave, boastful, some more action orientated and others are afraid of what they must do. These traits shift and mold as the story goes on as the reality of their situation also changes. I enjoyed the final passage before the cut, but I’ll let you check that out yourself.

Somewhere in the Woods
by Clifton Joseph Lee

A story in which our narrator, Jay, recounts and faces what it is to be a queer man through a story involving his father and brother. Interlaced with very fine prose, my favorite in the collection so far, the passages of memory weaving into the present wrapping up with a beautiful send-off.

A Good Man is a Mother
by Parker Durrance

The thing with most short stories as well as those I’ve read prior to this one is the Masculine collection is most tend to read like a snapshot moment in a character life’s, taking us only into this small part of a larger world. This one has the feel of a more complete, beginning to end story.

It shows a man named Owen, husband and father, who takes his family to visit his sister, Christine, for dinner. I noticed themes coming in from all sides, of family, fatherhood, what it takes to be one, how Owen and Christine each view the subject differently. It tackles masculinity and faith, the perspective of both. All the while, Owen periodically questions himself, as if still deciding – but ultimately affirming – his place in the world as a man. I like Owen because if you were to see him from another characters perspective, you might see a differently man entirely, maybe even fathers like those we’ve read so far.

Beginner’s Luck
by Peyton Popp

A story about a kid named Jon attending a late-night poker game with his mother recently married to his new step-father, Clint. He observes the men as the play and wants to join, though isn’t allowed due to his age. He only wants to play poker and seems to care for little else his step-father offers, like playing catch. You see the distance between them in Jon’s short replies.

I feel like I’ve seen this setting before. Tables surrounded by men laying out cards over some drinks. Likewise I’ve seen plenty of kids with step-parents and felt similar tension like what flicked through the air in this story at times.

Twins
by Nate Hanrahan

A story that takes place sharing the perspective of two twins whose father has gone and died in war. We start off looking through Jane’s eyes mulling over the absence of their gentle father. The only closure they might be able to find comes in two letters, one for their mother, the other for Jane’s sister, Madeline. Ideas of favoritism clouds Jane’s mind and the entire section in her mind struggling with a sense of abandonment is sorrowful and moving and my favorite part of the story. We see Madeline’s thoughts after she’s given birth to twins of her own and questions whether she could love one more than the other.

Sidewalks
by Rasmus Rosenkrantz

Here we follow a man on his 40^th birthday stuck in a systemic routine consisting of work and home and nothing else closely resembling adventure. Reminded by some advice given to him from his father, our narrator finally decides to step off the path.

I like this one for the presence of his father, so minimal yet still so overarching to the narrators’ actions. He craves to step out of bounds from the life he’s living. It makes me think about the men stuck in their own routines, routines that could last a lifetime and don’t really serve them in the end.

Flight of the Rain Machines
by L. Christopher

I’ve always liked Christopher’s prose. Dense in its wordplay, bouncing around from strong and punchy to ornate. This story is no different, putting us in the eyes of Jacob Rader riding his motorcycle to see an old fling. Like Christopher describes in his note at the end, this reads as old school romance, even doomed in its own way. It reads almost like a memory, it’s perspective on masculinity almost nostalgic.

Passage I liked:

The city night was charged with anticipation and possibility. A night in Lower Manhattan at a time when the Towers still stood, beer ran from my chin in amber rivers, the smell of cannabis entrenched me at every apartment door I called upon, a meal – a feast to end all others – Japanese food prepared at a Chinese restaurant, dancing, making fun of tourists, the squares, a fistfight, police, waking up alone and feeling for my keys, my teeth, where am I, where are You?

Any Reasonable Person
by Daniela Clemens

A priest walks into a bar. I like this story a lot but can’t quite place why. We follow Father Bartholomew, Farther Bart for short, visiting the One Horse Bar for a drink. He meets a woman named Bridge and the two fall into drinking and conversation involving light, humorous topics on faith, town ghost stories, deeper doubts and anxieties, both of them carrying a sense of longing that only really scratches the surface of what’s going on deeper between the pages.

A line I liked:

He can’t remember the last time he had a conversation as a man instead of a collar.

And the Thunder Rolls
by J. T. Morel

Most horrific story of this collection. Here we follow a night in Bo Duncan’s life steeped in an affair with an intern, and that doesn’t even touch on half of what this story contains. This sad, bleak and getting bleaker atmosphere is where Morel’s prose stands strongest. It never really stops pushing the knife deeper.

It approaches themes of fatherhood and marriage with painful clarity, the hollow in Bo’s eyes reflecting itself in a window telling you just how happy he really is.

Ruminate, Inc
by A. A Kostas

This one tickles me in a lot of the right places as I currently write this in a certain state of mind regarding my opinion on authority. Maybe it’s the other books I’ve been reading lately but as I’ve been reassessing myself as any writer should do, I find myself having always been and will most likely forever remain somewhat distrustful of authority.

In this story our narrator works for a tech company under the tyrannical control of its CEO, Godfrey. Nice play on the name. The narrator along with his associates suffer humiliating work tasks in which their every move is tracked. Phones traced, computer cursors movements recorded, even their eyes are watched by an AI system for any straying from the screen. To fight against this, the narrator forms a sort of team working to fight against this dictator in any way they can, even if it may be small.

I like how we never really see Godfrey in this story, but his presence remains always large. Being set in the confines of a tech company office was a fresh setting when compared to the loud, even explosive depictions of “revolutions.” It’s a reminder that such movements, or pushbacks, to tyranny can take place in smaller ways rather than storming a palace. With the limitations of a short story, we don’t exactly see all the details of the harsh treatment Godfrey inflicts on his employees, yet this feeling of constriction over their every move is enough. The story’s reference to webs was splendid, enjoying passages like the narrator describing their secret work against Godfrey as something akin to weaving such a web, while trapped in one in turn.

The Line
by Brock Eldon

This one takes us into a completely differently space compared to the past short stories, putting the reader behind the eyes of a gambler. A man named Jason gambling his life away while his marriage and family suffer the consequences. I think its most powerful scenes were the repetitious arguments between Jason and his wife, who constantly has to remind him he’s an addict in a never ending cycle until the one trying to save the addict chooses to walk away. With this the reader sees Jason’s agonized thoughts and anxieties over how being a gambler affects him as a man, husband and father.

I’ve never been a gambler myself, but I’ve seen its addiction everywhere. Seen mothers and fathers disappear the second they got a hold of some money or even the family savings, have watched coworkers from a dozen fields tapping the slots on their phones hoping to get just a few bills. There’s still so little talk of how prevalent gambling has become, especially among men. I see in the gamblers around me the same kind of person I see in Jason when he talks of luck, of the science of it. If I wanted anything more out of Jason’s character, I wished he was more superstitious as a sports bettor. I mean, come on, this story is set in Toronto. Where are the unwashed Jersey’s and the prayers over a bible?

Jokes aside, every day for Jason is all about bets, bets, bets, already a slippery slope but just like how many people convince themselves they won’t get cancer from smoking, what will they do when it actually happens?

Machete Man
by Spencer Oakes

The story of a machete man whose job is to clear through the bush for excavators searching for uranium deposits. They have some time off so they do a bit of drinking and frolicking while our aging narrator considers his life, the dog he has waiting for him back at a kennel with brief flashes of memory of his mother. The story is honest in terms of how our machete man spends his day, structured very moment to moment-like, the thoughts and at times the longing he feels but also dives into his day to day. He doesn’t just eat and sleep and drink but shits and jerks off and at times of loss doesn’t know how he feels at all. It’s prose is fun to read, doesn’t say common phrases conventionally.

One I liked:

In the morning, my head returned.

To Alex
by Antoine Robertson

This one explores the dynamic of male friendships with a bit of a twist. Our narrator, Tony, has a best friend named Alex. It’s the kind of friendship where Alex is willing to whisk Tony away for an 8-hour drive for Tony to see his sick mother. But over the years, Tony comes to find he might be in love with Alex.

I like the style of it being told in letters. I was actually worried about a tragic ending with that sort of structure, but was gladly mistaken, and it leaves my heart a little lighter. It explores male friendship in a starkly naked way, a certain passage three-quarters of the way in diving into particular moments in their friendship I don’t think I’ve read anywhere else as of yet. You’ll see.

Running
by Simon Johnson

Another story of friendship, placing us among the narrator and his friend, Nick, a friendship strained somewhat in the beginning by an accident and by the time it begins to heal, Nick will soon be setting off to study at a seminary. Helping them along the way is a passion project fixing up an old Miata that in many ways symbolizes their friendship, the project always becoming something of a way to spend the best kind of time together before they part.

Daiquiri
by R. A Hinkle

A quick read to end it off. Our narrator buys a Hemingway style daiquiri for himself and his friend, Loon. I can only describe their chat as something men would have, drifting off into the next topic without thought like any other with a friend. It reads like a bow wrapping it together and saying goodbye, which is what we have to do now to end off this collection.

Going - Gone - Flowing On

Caught in the winds of the laughing tunnel
Touching the sting of the last wind lick,
The ice so pale, I press it to my lips.

Watch it fall, drift across the scattered ice
Of a lake so shallow,
Singing – giggling towards the stars,
Then suspiring, drained, unable to reach
Through firmament bars.

Blinking in the dark
Fallen beneath the slender legs of the moon,
But they were not as fireproof as you.
The ashes in your palms say so,
Still burning, hissing like the Huron,
Going – gone – flowing on.

I read the second issue of Non Grata's magazine titled: The Dumb Phone and was going to put some comments on Notes for the poetry and short stories featured in it, as well as the fine matte finish that I liked more over the already great design of the first issue. I wasn’t going to say much on the essays originally because I never know how to comment on them to begin with other than a: “Good essay!” Or: “Really gets me thinking!” Especially when it comes to the subject of A.I. and the technological future and our place in it. It’s more my fault; I usually agree with a lot of what these writers have to say and make the mistake of leaving it at that. Off the bat, they’re all well written and do genuinely make me think about what’s being said; though I don’t think I can bring much to the table when it comes to arguments regarding technology. I grew up in a place where tech and even the idea of smartphones happened slowly, and even now I avoid certain parts of it, mostly to my own detriment. I still don’t really understand nor do I trust QR codes, and never take my phone to scan one. Back in December at Non Grata’s first launch, I was taken aback when the nice lady standing by a table stacked with first issue magazines available for purchase directed me to a QR code taped to the table when I offered cash. I walked away. I was given a copy later.

Another reason being is I don’t think I’m nearly as smart as the people writing these essays, as my mind is usually swept up in fiction, and it’s where I can put my thoughts and words together best. I don’t really care to debate or argue with many opinions either because I couldn’t debate myself out of a paper bag. What these essays make me think about in the long run is reading in general, so as I considered some kind of “review” for some of these essays, it later fell into this:

Part of what I like about the magazine is the ability to read it as a physical copy in my hands; this being the same with other printed books like American Pleasure, or a recently released collection of short stories called Masculine, which then reminds me of the importance of reading. I don’t make it a secret that I read regularly to any friends I have, even distant family, especially coworkers. Often they wonder how I have the time, or how I can stand being still for so long, how a beer and the game can’t be more interesting than the books I read. Sometimes people ask for tips on reading and, sure, not like I want to be an authority on anything, but I love reading, and want others to love reading for thousands of reasons we’ve all heard before – discovering you’re not alone, or putting to words thoughts and feelings you’ve never been able to articulate before, sentences that blow your mind and rock your soul – and as I get older and watch the world change, I start to feel a bit more urgency in its importance. But, you know, I can’t just spill these rants on them on why they should read, it will only scare them away. So I usually tell them to read what’s in their interests. If it’s someone I know well, I’ll add in a bit more, tell them that reading is more important than not reading. But if I get the chance, I always add that, while reading in their interests, they should know that there are great books out there that will change you, make you think, help you answer questions you’ve been asking your whole life. They make you laugh, and I swear to God they can make you cry. A book, most of all, will challenge you. Reading a book is work – even the act of scanning the page, thinking about and absorbing what’s being read – takes energy. And when you work for a boss that looks down on you, have a wife/husband that hates you, children that seem to be going down a horrifying path, are just trying to survive whatever past has brought you shivering towards this very moment, why would you want to spend the energy absorbing a book, especially something complex, like the work of Dickinson or Faulkner?

There are so many conversations about reading and the current state of things, the bleak horror that awaits us in a world of A.I. and losing our minds to the phone. Some advocate for expulsion from the technological world, a full retreat into living as a luddite. Others want to step back to simpler ways of using tech, like with dumb phones, or radios, typewriters and longhand and so on. Both ways aren’t so bad, but that also depends on the territory of your goals, be it in life however you want to live it or in my own as a writer. Mine being what they are, I don’t necessarily want to be a luddite, and I think moderation as well as an understanding in how you could use tech is beneficial.

Tech should be a tool, and I try to treat it as best I can - among other things - with moderation. I also just like using old things. I use a radio for music when I’m cooking or cleaning because that radio has been in my family for five decades, and it’s fun to turn the nobs for the jazz station and direct the antenna to the window. I use a typewriter for most of my writing save some essays or off the cuff poems here and there because I think it’s fun, and of course it’s a tool to fight off distraction. But I also love to work with my hands, clean the typewriter and load the scroll and edit my drafts with a pencil for the same reason I would rather work on my own personal labor projects than an employer, because it feels rewarding to build something for yourself. The physicality of creating a piece of art, the likelihood for strain when using a pen or banging away on a typewriter gives a feeling of worth. The act of creating a physical manuscript is hard work, and only one component to the impact and wear it can have on your own mind. Madness is a common side effect. It’s ridiculous, if you think about it, that artists would choose a profession with such a high chance for suicide, but maybe that tells us it isn’t a choice.

So we all are trying to find a solution, whether it’s a different phone or no phone at all or forcing yourself to read more. That last part is a glaring issue, because some of us have found ourselves – as readers or writers – beginning to read the great books a little too late, as well as finding that same joy for those books too late. So a lot of us are rushing to catch up for whatever reason, maybe competitive, maybe a feeling to prove something, or to be the smartest person in the room, to enrich your mind with knowledge and poetry and more. But there’s a haste to it, literal rushing, and it spoils the reading entirely, can even rob you of everything – or much – of what those books have to offer.

So this highlights another problem, that many of the people who do read don’t retain what they are reading. Never mind being performative, we don’t highlight reading slowly, or remembering what we read. But if we’re lucky to realize this and we do turn to books with the intention of truly thinking about what it’s saying, the work may be slow going at first. It could feel like wading through mud, trying to piece things together, understand the long, archaic words in the context of the passage they’re in. Even remembering the paragraph above is a chore. It gets easier the more you do it, because in the work of reading, you’re strengthening your mind the same way you get stronger through deadlifts – by doing more deadlifts.

But why is that? And what does strengthening your mind really do? Why is the act of reading draining you so much? A gabble of several: The book and words therein makes you think, and the subjects can be endless. The book might demand you to contemplate endless subjects from the concept of death to love, to the question of purpose, to your identity to self and country, and some of these books might demand you to read such through words you’ve never read before, and if you want to understand, you have to look that word up wherever that may be and try to add it into the context in which it was written. Even character description demands your focus and grasp for memory. Now, some readers can just scan this and move on, hence why no one remembers what they just read, nor can they even understand it. But let’s commit to the pull-ups, and think about what we’re being told when we read McCarthy’s description of Suttree’s ex-wife, who he had abandoned by the time of reading this:

“Remember her hair in the morning before it was pinned, black, rampant, savage with loveliness. As if she slept in perpetual storm.”

So you read slowly and you want to remember this, so you stop for a second and reread the passage or set the book down to think about it and you come up with a picture that only you see. I see the tangles and disarray and maybe even a pale face partially hidden in all that hair, and I think of the storm blowing it whether it comes from the trees or on a ship through a typhoon, and for a moment I see those trees and those waves.

But we’ve seen all these studies of people who can’t even do that anymore. It’s not even like this passage is making me question God or something. I know people personally who wouldn’t be able to understand what they just read in the above passage, and another serious problem is the fact that the number of university students – who will go on to impact our lives from trades to politics – who struggle with understanding what they read is growing.

What does a book do? Different for everyone, but you could try to simplify it by saying readers approach a book with the idea of ‘what will this book do for me’ in mind. What are they going to learn? How? Are they looking for entertainment? Can they be entertained as well as question the meaning of life? But reading is a healing thing; sitting alone in a room, engaging in it quietly. We all know silence calms the nerves and a wired mind, but what about reading something deeply, slowly, and savoring what’s being said? Literature, my bias being for fiction, but the best literature reminds us that we are going to die and to come to terms with that. We question the value of living in Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be.’ Emily Dickinson talks with the dead in ‘I died for Beauty - but was scarce.’ Endless artists have approached finality in all forms, how to face it, how to move on from it, and I believe even how to prepare for it. We could try to strip it down to even simpler forms, if this were best: We come to a book hoping it could make us wiser, confident, perhaps kinder to others and to oneself.

That’s pretty good, right? Let’s dive into the idea of thinking. Why is it good to think? This should be a no-fucking-brainer, as thinking is what’s brought about what we know of as civilization. What’s most crucial about reading specifically is its ability to improve your critical thinking, which is what allows us to question, and with the ability to question, you now have the ability to ask yourself what is really going on in a story like Hamlet. Is Hamlet really insane? Is the ghost of his father really his father? Who is the Man in the Macintosh? What is Moby Dick really? Well, now the questions that follow those questions spill out, too many to count. But the important thing here is that you have the ability in the first place. How many times have people read Moby Dick and come to the conclusion that the whale is just a whale? Are they really mulling over the question? Is the question even what the whale is in the first place? It’s not that they’re pondering and concluding that the whale is just a whale, the people I’m talking about who shrug the question from their shoulders so easily are not even mulling over the questions that novel has to offer because they can’t see there’s even a question being asked in the first place.

So let’s explore the concept of thinking for yourself, here, or questioning, if you will. Say there were a few world leaders who advocate going to war, and so they send young men into a slaughterhouse for however many years, the result of which leads to the eventual shaking of hands between those same leaders who were formally enemies, while the soldiers who committed their lives to that war have to deal with the trauma and endless repercussions that will likewise spread to their family and may even destroy it. Sure, this war – it does not have to even be a war – was most likely labeled under a good cause. It’s the ‘right thing’ to do because of the terrible ‘other,’ or because it is to protect freedom or the rights of whoever people. Who knows what the promise may be for carrying out this cause, whether it’s the promise of a utopia or divine reward, and you’re promised all these things the utopia will bring and you think ‘hell yeah I’ll serve that cause’ because you will be on what those same leaders declare to be the ‘good side’ helping ‘the world’ and so you give them what they want, whatever they want to deliver that utopia. So now they ask for your freedom, however that may be, maybe they conduct mass surveillance, spy on everything you do, limit where you can go, even steer the masses towards committing genocide. Thing is, there’s usually a line to these things, and everyone has a chance to stop things from getting so far. But there’s always that line, and if you’re too stupid – meaning not a critical thinker – how are you going to be able to question the true intentions of these promisers? What’s there to say you may not even enjoy going out into the killing fields to do your job?

If you were a critical thinker, maybe read some history, you would see the past is full of promises with an outcome of death. You might see similarities to what they are promising, and if the rest of a population has the knowhow to question, these promisers must have the ability to be able to answer these questions. Thing I notice about most public promisers these days is they don’t even have to act smart or give a smart reason as to why they want to implement their policies. They no longer quote Whitman or Shakespeare and weave their poetry into the context of their reasonings for their speeches, because if the populace is stupid, all they have to do when answering the question as to why you now have to go to a war they don’t have to fight in is: “Because we just have to do it, so, yeah.” Now, if this promiser has bad intentions, a well read, critically thinking populace will be able to see through that based off of the promisers’ actions and answers to their questioning. If the promiser is also well read, you can argue that they would be able to maneuver around the question, tell lies, coax the populace into believing them. Of course one person squaring off against a well-read promiser has a challenge to face, but what about a well-read promiser having to answer the questions of thousands, even millions of readers? This is not just fiction we’re talking about, we have everything on the table from fiction to history to psychology to give everyone the mental fortitude to ask - sometimes basic - questions of people who think they have the right to govern you. I’d imagine it to be hard to lie to that many people.

I had a conversation with Marigold about something along these lines. Poor guy was asking for honest advice on a piece he was working on and I just went off. Maybe it has a good place here. I wanted to inject the idea to the importance of being able to use your own head as a whole, not as a way to downgrade his thoughts regarding dumb phones and what modern technology is doing to us, more as something to steer him to the imperativeness of reading? Maybe? At the time you could say I was still figuring it out - still am.

When I told him what I told him, I approached it from the path of politics, in a way. I did this because we live in the political world, and nearly everyone is made to feel its stranglehold. People read books these days from hundreds of years ago and they can ONLY put it under the context of politics, and that’s if they even read at all. Thing with the political world is everyone just wants to be right. Now, you have people out there – you could say a majority – who don’t really care about being right, but just to feel right, or to be part of a certain crowd. You could call those people lost, if you want, though I don’t like to believe it. I think anyone has a chance. Anyway, forget those people, because those are the peltasts of the promisers, what’s crucial here is reaching the people who want to know, to learn, to be able to make a proper argument for or against political policies.

Reading is crucial even for politics, and when it comes to reading, if you sit a reader and a scroller in a room together, it won’t be long into a conversation when you’ll be able to tell the difference. Regarding politics, every ideology YOU align with was written in a book. Every policy and cause you believe was put together, pondered and formed into written language by names most ideological people won’t even recognize. And, like fiction, these ideas were built off the backs of countless other philosophical and political ideas, many of them also expressed through fiction. I’m pretty serious when I mean everything. How many philosophers, scientists and promisers of the past cited their inspirations from fiction, or even participated in the act of reading for mere enjoyment like Einstein did with The Brothers Karamazov? Stories are the greatest human invention. In questioning the stars by the campfire and crafting them into gods with stories that would come to fuel the myths of empires, you begin to set the building blocks of the same people who will come to question just what those stars really are, and maybe strive, even invent something, to discover what they are.

So, back to the point I was trying to stress. Let me give you the same scenario I gave Marigold. Pretend I’m a communist and you’re a fascist, and that both of us were going to have a debate arguing for both our beliefs. Two extremes, I know, but I don’t care. Say I learned everything about my belief by reading its books, even if it were only a few. Hell, let’s say I’ve read the books that spawned your beliefs, and I probably should, since we’re talking about a debate here. Say all the information you’ve learned is through doomscroll reels and second-hand sources, with no real idea on whether those sources are honest and without bias. How would you even know what you’re supposed to really believe? Likewise, you could step down a few levels from this, even step away from reading entirely. If you were speaking to someone on the subject of the Ojibwe ‘little people’ folklore, and you know nothing on the subject, but the person you’re speaking to has read or been given folklore through a reel. Even if it were biased, if you don’t know any stories of the Memegwesi, what can you add to the topic?

The bigger problem here is these promisers I keep labeling, who want to do with you whatever they will for whatever goal, do read, have read, and are surrounded by people who also read or have read. To know the books of the people you are suspicious of is to get closer to understanding of their true intentions. What I noticed with the modern day - but you can also say this isn’t very different to the past - is a lot of these people disregard fiction altogether. If someone were to discount all this and say these people - promisers, tech entrepreneurs - are not real readers, or misinterpret what they read and if that were really true, then that realization that we do not have proper, thinking readers on the world stage terrifies me. Let me try to get to why.

Thing is that the promisers or powers that be don’t want you to read, even more so they don’t want you to know how to read.. But let’s add a little history to the mix, and think about what’s happened to civilization - its kingdoms and empires - when its population becomes illiterate and succumbs to the whims of a promiser. There are a few dark ages in our history that I think can answer that question.

Yeah, sure, let me be a bit of an apocalyptic preacher here and tell you this is the real road to a civilizational collapse. But let me put it this way, because I’m not even saying we’re exactly heading to the kind of collapse where we lose the wheel and migrate back to being serfs. We could still have all of this: phones, TVs, cars, mass entertainment a click away, nice shoes, freedom and money to travel anywhere you want. Even though I don’t think it’s possible for us to keep a world like that going, my point is if we can’t read and have lost the ability to question, then we will be no different to the serfs and peasants who believed the lords in their castles that can do and harm us however they please are there by divine right, and we will believe that because only the lords – promisers, religious leaders – will know how to read, and will know how to manipulate you. They will read scripture to crowds who won’t even know the difference if what is being spoken is true or not, and plays will be written glorifying dynasties.

Let’s approach this at a different angle and return to the promisers we deal with today. Reading makes you think, thinking is like armor against those who would do you harm. It is openly discussed by the promisers working in the tech field that with the use of A.I. they will be able to implant wires into our brain, or conduct some sort of technology in any sort of way, in order to be able to predict your own thoughts and desires and present to you the option which you want to consume without having to even think of it. So they want you to go about living without thinking. How the fuck is that any different to being a zombie? Do we want these people - who as we’ve begun to see in various interviews that they want to kill creativity, or sway civilizations towards colonizing planets or live in floating cities, or make the price of real food so high that only they can enjoy it, because THEY believe that is the way to go and they’re hardly thinking of you when they make these decision - to have this much control? And if we can’t think for ourselves because we’ll be zombies, how can we say no?

So what do we do? This leads me to another topic that haunts me about the dangers of reading. Because, you look at the modern day, and more people are or know how to read than any other time, but why is the world so nervous? The people who do read appear to be no less zombielike as people who can’t. This coincides with the predicament that a majority of ‘change,’ that being in revolutions are most likely to happen when a nation has a large reading populace. It seems to mostly straddle or is close to the 50 percent mark. The literacy rate at the time of the French and Iranian Revolution was roughly 50 percent. Russian Revolution had somewhere around 40 percent, and the thirteen colonies by the time of the American Revolution had a literary rate of 90 percent.

What haunts me so much is the result of these revolutions. Thanks to the printing press, reading was no longer something the powers that be could control and keep from the populace. So now everyone could read, and now everyone could question everything from the poor treatment of employees to the claimed divinity of world leaders. But look at the outcome of a lot of these revolutions. In the 20^th century alone, almost 300 million people were slaughtered by by promisers that swore of a utopia. How many of these revolutions ended with the systems the populace was fighting still in place anyway, be it in a different form or not? Other factors leading to such movements can be argued for, economic hardship and harsh treatment of governments, a nobility enjoying their cakes while their people starve. But how many of these revolutions - I’m talking the big numbers - were led by someone who could not read, who would regularly quote fiction from the past? Now, if it’s true that reading has a close relationship with the events leading to these outcomes, it’s frightening and at times discouraging for me to recommend literature like the work of Dante when someone like Trotsky advocated the reading of the poet and literature as a whole out of his belief that literature was a mirror in order to learn about oneself. So I nod my head to this, because it speaks so true to what literature is, but then I know what these ideas of these people have done or attempted to do. I only bring up Trotsky because him as a reader has been on my mind recently, but all the names of that time were reading, and read widely. Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, Robespierre, about anyone that’s rocked the boat with the lives of other people on their time.

So are we fucked either way? If we don’t read, we become zombies, if we do read, we are likely to cause a storm and end up swept into a mass grave anyway. It’s a topic that’s been on my mind for a while and I’ve never been sure how to approach it. Because I don’t want anyone to die from either option, but how can I tell people to read and to read widely for so many imperative reasons, and yet the very act of becoming a reader and thinker also risks such horror?

Could you argue the readers that lived and participated in those revolutions were not real readers? Did they also scan the page and retain nothing from it for the same reasons of exhaustion and distractions we have today? Were they performative? Syphilitic? Too stupid to understand because of the ignorant modern notion that the people that lived before us had less of an understanding about the world because they don’t live in our time? Could be, but it’s also not like the horrors in these spaces of history happened because of a lack of reading alone. We can go back to the claim for moral reasons, or economic instability, oppression as factors that stand over reading. On the topic of morality, where does it come from in the first place? Everything that has been thought has been put into a book in order for us to read, learn and build off of. Literature carries the human experience in such a way as to make countless others feel less alone and has taught some of the greatest thinkers to come about and archive their words to be preserved forever. A book tells the history of the time in which it was written. It’s why the notion that people back then didn’t even think like us is loonie. You’ll see diary entries from nuns to emperors centuries, even thousands of years ago that show human beings writing their thoughts, articulating the same joys and sorrows you feel.

Still, I notice a connection between reading and mass schooling, implemented in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and of course I’m not arguing against education, but why is it that so much blood has been spilled when you have a large literate society taught by the institutions of mass schooling? Well, when you’re in a classroom in a small school or a university, and you’re basically rendered as someone who knows nothing and is in need of learning, and these students look up to their teachers – who ultimately have the responsibility of leading these kids on a properly educated path – to me it looks eerily similar to a group of illiterate serfs listening to the preaching’s of the village priest or the speech of a lord with no way to convince yourself whether what they’re saying is true. People are vulnerable, the young are vulnerable, when you go out into the world you give yourself over to ideas, especially those spouted by others, and can be changed by them, and what’s to say you’ll be able to tell the difference if the right teach with bad intentions leads you to read the book the way THEY wanted to?

So do I have a solution? I don’t know. I think art needs to be ripped out of the hands of institutions to some degree. For too long, it has had influence over how great books are to be read and how it is accessed by the people, who have been raised by these institutions and forces into making people believe what each book has to offer is forever out of reach unless you have the money, because only they can provide what the book has to offer to its reader. I don’t necessarily advocate for the burning down of institutions, but there’s something here that’s missing when it comes to how the scholars of today teach literature compared to the academic communities of ancient Greece. Maybe it was how the Greeks approached their literature in the eyes of history. Books like the Iliad and the Odyssey were stories the Greeks truly believed in, and they are deeply insightful and human stories that led the Greeks into thinking they were living in an epoch among the gods of Olympus.

I’m not saying this is what we or the institutions need to do with literature, but one thing I know the schools have done to literature is suck the fun out of it. The Greeks loved their stories because it affirmed them, schools force demanding reading quotas and bend it be read in a certain way, a narrowing of yourself. There’s no enjoyment, nothing that makes you want to truly sit down and spend your time – precious time you will not get back – and have a good, pleasurable reading experience.

Maybe there are those who will argue the world, modern civilization and so on, needed the institutions in order for literature to explode the way it has, but is that really true? The institutions expanded because there were more people reading in those times, many who read because they liked to. And even with the horrors of the revolutions, I think the ability to read weaving itself into these movements is a positive thing. We were quite happy back then; despite all what terrible things were still going on I know people are seething over when I say that. I know there were flaws, so shut up. But we were happier, relaxed, had respect for nature, ate healthier food, work-life balance was far from what it is today, and just as many good and just ideas were coming about alongside the terrible.

Back to the institutions: do we really need them? Many people the academics would look at as ‘common’ all enjoyed reading the works of Shakespeare long before mass schooling. Even today people enjoy reading without the opinions of the higher offices. I love reading; I’ve never stepped foot into a university. The books I eventually found, were found for the most part on my own. When I read them, the first read was always for enjoyment. Shakespeare was an entertainer in his time, his plays were written with entertainment in mind because that brought in viewers who would return and more viewers earned more money. But it wasn’t the lords that kept Shakespeare alive in his time, but the people that came to view his plays and were touched in such a way as to come back to see it again, if not other plays. They spread the word and kept the discussion going, and so other plays that did not impact them as much were pushed to the wayside and forgotten. It is the chatter of readers and viewers that eventually reached the lords that would bring more money to the theaters, and patrons to the Bard, and soon enough the lords talked about his work too, even after he died. Then came the scholars. A person who reads, who can think critically and question will always be able to make the decision on whether a work is remembered or forgotten for themselves. A reader is a step closer to being their own living person, confident in themselves and not easily swayed by another’s opinion, who is not afraid to keep a book alive through word of mouth or passing copies from hand to hand. The people who read will together choose and ensure the most meaningful stories survive any way possible, be it by writing or speaking about it. The books that are meant to be forgotten will be, it does not matter how much you might like a book, because there are forces outside of one person that makes such a judgement.

And the people access those works by experiencing it themselves. That’s the part the institutions need to stick clear of. It reminds me of my struggles with Dostoevsky the first time I read him. I had absorbed too much information beforehand of what to think about his work before taking it on myself. I didn’t give myself bare basics and went from there. Something like Moby Dick was a book I heard good things about my whole life before finally reading it. But for the most part, it was always relaxed. I was never made to read it, but I saw it referenced in media everywhere, and the people around me who had read it told me it was ‘good’ or that they ‘liked it.’ The wonderful thing is, up to when I finally read it almost ten years ago, I still had never been ‘hyped’ for Moby Dick, and was even unaware of some crucial plot points regarding the ending. By then, I was in the ring corner huffing and puffing over my struggles with Fyodor, and made sure to avoid any hype of Moby Dick besides the famous saying of: ‘It’s the best novel ever written.’

Sad to say I’m somewhat pessimistic that we can create new readers that are not already born. Look, I’d love for my coworkers to read and enjoy what I’ve written, but most of the people I’ve worked with haven’t read a book since they were fifteen. Some even younger. One guy barely knows how to read already. That doesn’t account for the readers that already exist, and are in the millions, and who actually do want to read good books – the biggest hurdle now is to get past the trust factor of everything, for the same reasons institutions have ruined the fun of reading. So yes, I think the really good writers today will be able to entertain and impact readers in a meaningful way, and maybe even ‘wake up’ a few readers, but that just might be crumbs when you look at how bleak things are in the world regarding the critical thinking aspect.

Reading complex works, or any works, shouldn’t be thrusted onto someone, most certainly a child. You should read Shakespeare to babies, and other works, from Dickens to Charlotte’s Web. Reading could be made into an active part of a kid’s day. When you read Shakespeare to a baby, the baby listens. Kids listen; from the moment they’re born they’re trying to make sense of the world around them. Is it a bad thing for a child to be able to know and ponder the meaning of Sonnet 29? Why do some people seem so against it? Why should a parent deny reading to their child the works of Shakespeare when it seems – I say seems because I haven’t read all his plays – that what was written contains every interior thought a human has managed? Why shouldn’t they be raised with the ability to ask questions? Beyond that, growing up a few years, I don’t think mass schooling should thrust these books onto them the way they have. I mean, yes, you can still argue that’s not the problem, but in terms of how they teach books, the current method doesn’t work. We wouldn’t have so few readers if it did. Why can’t it just be done naturally like teachers I remember who would set down a dozen books and give you your pick, done encouragingly?

So I’m a bit pessimistic about how much things can be ‘saved’ before things get better. It’s not like I don’t hope I’m wrong about all this. In the end I still hold some hope, despite what essays might exist that should make me doubt, or any essay or opinion that might throw my ideas into the trash as incoherent, but I’m still hopeful. We seem to be surrounded by life deniers everywhere, the kind even the greatest tragedies steer clear from, because this kind of life denying is not poetic, not pondered with the idea of healing and overcoming in mind. It is pathetic, it is frightening, it cannot understand poetry because it has nothing to feel it with, it has to be stopped. While history shows what could happen when art dies, we’ve also had people for all of history lamenting that art was dying. But art has made it this far, even with some bumps along the road, so I guess that’s enough to keep going for now.

A writer I was once blessed with meeting announced a conundrum they were facing that made me face my own. They got a job working as a writer for a structured company, but they would have to walk away from what they’re doing here. Their work is too honest, you see, too open and willing to dig into the fine details of a personalized blog that most top sellers shy away from.

I get why, they made it very clear it was for the money. Good money too, and the chance for more, I’d bet. Like anyone offered a good, steady cheque in exchange for something that you already do, we’d all be hard-pressed not to take it. Opportunities like these don’t come by often, and when you want things like marriage, house, family, you’ve got to go where the money is.

They’re not the only one to do this and there have by far been worse cases. I’m actually happy for them and hope they continue writing and I’m confident they may swoop by again if they do really go. But what do you think? Writer, artist, sculptor or reader, would you walk away from what you are for a steady income, a guaranteed house? What would the price be? 100k? 200k?

Would I take that deal? I could say no, but a lot of us could say no. I’ve never been offered money for something like that. Yeah, I’ve walked away from a lot of career opportunities, maybe to my own detriment, but what if I was offered money as a writer?

Of course I want to make money. We all want to do this full time. I’m going to publish my first novel you guys know about on here because I don’t want to waste my time waiting on a feeble agent that can’t take a cuss word, as well I also want to see how far I can get doing this, like a personal bet. But what if someone came to me years from now with an offer…

This would be a lot easier to answer if it depended on how much I might have to bend to fit in the way ‘they’ want me to. Would this offer include changing myself or the persona I convey as Brandon Westlake in and outside of Substack? What would have to go to meet a certain requirement.

Still, it’s so easy to say no. But where I’m at right now, I’d still call it a sin. I wouldn’t even take money from Non Grata if they asked me to do something like that. I’m a writer. I’m a better writer than I’ve ever been the more open I am about it, the more I believe in it. I know what it’s like to let it all just sit still inside, you self-destruct and start to rot. You’ll destroy others before you destroy yourself.

I’m not spitting at anyone that would go down that route. You can’t be blamed in these weird times. Some might even take that money to try and further something as a writer and if that’s the case, do it. It’s not for me.

Maybe that’s another reason why I’m here, talking and writing openly. If anyone wants to work with me, you know what I have to offer, because I’m not changing shit. Thing I hate most about some sort of hand guiding yours is the likelihood that you will be pulled back from crossing a certain boundary. Taboos still reign large, their upholders’ skin is thin as a balloon, and some don’t want to poke it. What was once taboo is quite the norm, not only in subject but in what is said, written, spilled into some form of language. The bits that matter are poorly done and the rest is boring. Art that isn’t boring can’t survive with a leash.

I’ve committed enough sins already by turning away or deleting a line. Think I’d like to move past that now.

But I guess we’ll see if someone offers me money.

It’s Here!

It’s here!
What may thee be,
But an exit dance
Like the dirt thud fall
Of apple trees.

And so the view bends
Little sliver of the sky,
Seeking waves, gust of storm – a wonder to these eyes.

And many had come
To peek the outmost strip,
Awaiting sparks, a remedy, the tap of a dancer’s shoes.

Many more would feel
In their jittering bones, wordless weep and pine,
The glass shuttered dark with a sigh
For an answer,
So far – a question - forever open.

But Still You Had to See the Moon

Stirring,
The raindrops dancing
From leaf to leaf, pulling you from precious sleep.

You remember last night?
We started the fire early
With the rest of their laughter, these gratifying chimes rolling the stars.

We watched the sun
There! sinking
Behind nimbus birch, a curtain’s close.

Some stared
Others spoke
You loved them, but still you had to see the moon.

Out there
Watching, shuffling off
As if from stage, beholding, awed by a torch so bright.

Surrounded – shadows and memories
Following me
Round and round – going on for centuries.

You came to dread
The moments and years
Dreams to come, and never heard.

And darkness
It came to tell
Is not only what stood in the air.

There it was
Laid bare before you
A few scars and broken parts, but pushing on,
Forgetting those too afraid to start.

Introduction

A man finds himself alone.

Everyone, when there used to be an everyone, would talk about how we would never miss silence until the noise never stopped. But they never thought that they might miss the noise once that was gone too.

To them, it was a dangerous thing, silence. Brought with it a different sort of noise with a likelihood of being cut short with a noose, leading them on that unending quest of gnashing teeth and progress eating away at the earth, the forests and the very rock beneath all that dirt – all to make sure the noise never stopped.

Even the man tried to run from it when they were all gone – when he knew he was really alone. Running through the streets to hear the sound of his steps, calling and calling until his voice would give out and still trying after as if it could save him from that implacable quiet between each cry.

But he would fall silent in time. Its very presence only had to wait. Perhaps he knew that too.

In the years to follow he would cease to think his own name – as if the absence of people there to speak it to him made it go up like smoke. He’d speak to himself sometimes, to the flames of his fire or to the dark ceiling of every house he would find shelter in. He would speak as if he were rehearsing something, perhaps in case they would return. But he knew they wouldn’t and he would stop himself before he was finished and would go on staring into the flames.

He traveled the land, borrowing cars sitting there waiting for him to pick and with as much gas as he would ever need. He went on foot between the clustered lanes of highways and city downtowns. Food was in abundance. He could do what he wanted and did so. He drove at speeds that would have locked him up for years, fired guns from rooftops and set whole towns ablaze and wept when the flames spread to the forests. He drank himself into insanity and woke in pain – such pain that he thought he’d never survive. In the middle of stadiums he would squat and shit and from the Eiffel Tower itself he dropped his drawers to pleasure himself over the streets of Paris. None of it meant anything to the man in the end. There was no one else to come home to, no one to speak to, no one to laugh with.

Even art had lost its touch. He would gaze, over all these years, on the greatest works to survive but only darkness would cover his heart knowing that in this empty world there were no other souls to enjoy it. He wanted to destroy them all – to slash the Mona Lisa’s face with a knife and knock over the unfinished works of Michelangelo. He thought of laughing gleefully as he melted every piece of bronze Rodin ever molded and he believed he could have danced before the Louvre, the Uffizi or the Metropolitan while they all burned. But he could never bring himself to do it.

On countless beaches he would sit to watch the crashing waves and shifting clouds – all over the world, wherever he may please – pondering the philosophies of the world if only to convince himself there were still reason to keep breathing. But, like art, all rationale and convictions fell away from his mind like sand. Even God had little place in his heart now, just like the world, for none would answer his prayers or cries no matter how often he turned to them, pleading, cursing, all for an answer that never came. Perhaps he was abandoned – perhaps there had been nothing there in the first place. All he knew was that no one bowed east anymore, that there was no one left to warm their hands to the flames of the Jwala Ji Temple and that no one danced the Sema nor spoke the word or sang from the heart a vesper hymn and yet the world rolled on through darkness between diamond stars and here he remained.

Unless he was not. Long into the silence and the years, the man would scan the heavy dark around him from the windows of mansions or the cover of trees, certain that somewhere – here! there! – he had heard something, caught a glimpse of another thing. A cry somewhere, a shout, shadows beneath a door, behind a high-rise window.

He would go many nights without a fire, abandoning the cities and towns for the wild wilderness in which other dangers lied. The creatures of the earth, big and small, most ferocious and casting glimmers of animalistic malice from their glowing eyes – who fear no man now that there was no man to fear and so they would chase him despite the lifted rifle and spent bullets. From those cold dead fires, he would shamble through the brush for the highest hill, blind stupid in all that dark and he would survey the land for any other point of flame somewhere out there. He’d watch the stars or the bright moon that would swallow them and he would tell himself someone was watching him.

He would force them from hiding. So many cars and so many tools on hand for him to pilfer built a great mound of tires smack in the middle of the city. As he climbed this makeshift pyramid with spent breath and back bowed beneath his burden, the man swore he could see them already, those who followed. Dashing and fleeing into the deeper cracks of alleyway and crevice and some he would call to but never would they answer.

Doused in gasoline like it were a marinade, he ignited the puddle with a torch and watched the trail lick its way to the black mountain. He could feel the heat coming off the burning pile from where he stood and climbed the steps to the top floor of the townhouse. From there he waited by the window, glassing the land around that great column of smoke rising to dance with marble white clouds.

He waited for hours. It was an apartment complete with books he had already read and a television, old furniture – kitchen appliances dangling from hooks and glass menageries sitting behind a dust covered cabinet. He wondered if those who once lived here had read all the books on the shelf, what the last thing they played on the television was. He approached a mirror and studied his disheveled features. Longer hair, a gnarled beard showing signs of gray. Scars and weather lines marking creases into his skin – less human than he remembered.

The man knew he had forgotten how to be such a thing as human. And in that anguish he craved to know another – to look into their eyes and hear their voice, to know their touch and laugh with them.

He tore himself from the mirror and set into position at the window, raising the rifle and scanning what he could see of the street around the column of black smoke.

There could be no chances in a world that meant so little now. For all he desired, he was a beast killing another beast before it may do the same. That was the wilderness the animals that had given him these scars lived in and it was a world now no different to his.

Still, another face.

But he only sharpened his eyes when one did flash. From the next street over, halting to gaze at this gusty mound from hell they covered their noses from, the black smoke tearing a gash into the sky also in their eyes – tearing themselves and scanning the streets knowing they had been caught and stood immobile in those crosshairs and hovering finger deciding and in his thoughts he was just a beast killing another beast.

Couple coins goes a long way if you feel obliged. But it’s enough if you’re just here for the ride.

But Me A Coffee

Decided to make a change and write this recent play I’ve been working on in longhand. It’s not something I’ve done since I was a kid other than in my notes, and as a kid I most likely stopped writing longhand out of laziness. But that’s not all true, something like a computer – later on a typewriter – always worked best to get down my burst of ideas faster than what longhand would have done.

I think all the false starts regarding this play was one part of it. I do a lot of thinking before I ever put a word to paper, then those first words are usually in the form of notes before I ever really start to write the story. Most often – with all my work, really – there are a lot of false starts, moments when I thought I had it, wrote a few pages or chapters, only for my confidence to plummet and I end up scrapping what I’ve written. The usual doubt settles in and you feel like your mind is about to crack, usually forgetting that false starts are normal for me and that the key to what I need to begin whatever project is about to hit any moment. Course I could just be copying my ‘heroes’ that wrote longhand, I’m sure I’m not the only one in that camp.

I didn’t even come back to the play with the intention of writing it in longhand. Thought I only needed more notes to iron out the outlining details before I was swallowed into the flow of the narrative. For a moment I even thought of going the Hemingway route, who I believe wrote longhand to start off his session and switched to the typewriter if he was going hot. But I never did, blessed with the euphoria of the flow no artist dares to interrupt.

Everything worked, simple as that. The characters, the dialogue, the setting. Something unique I feel is important to note is how often my mind would fix other problems in the play long before I ever reached that point in the writing – even moments I’m still nowhere close to reaching now. Not like it’s a new thing, but the clarity of these ideas when writing in longhand over typing was exciting.

I’ve been reading studies on writing longhand for the past few weeks. Deep down, I always knew the benefits of longhand over typing, but I’ve been fascinated lately of just how impactful it really is for the brain. When we write with a keyboard, we actually use so little of our brains in the process, this is partly because of the flow state, allowing us to not have to think very hard on exactly what we’re doing, coupled with the fact that all one has to do is press a button and bam! the word is there. The same is true for typewriters, which requires just a little more brainpower than the computer because, unlike the computer, we have a little more time to think about what we’re writing, what comes next, etc. Thing is, it’s a false flow state, one that feels like we’re submitting to our unconscious when in truth we’re just typing, smacking down whatever word comes to our heads without really thinking about what’s going on. But when we use longhand, the very physical act of putting words together, like the difference between writing a ‘d’ to a ‘b’ fires up the whole factory, and the added time in writing a page by hand just fuels the next lines with even richer stuff.

Almost a year ago I had read how the Russian writer Dostoevsky was able to change the style of his hand according to the characters he was writing as well as their emotional states. The thought of it floored me and I couldn’t imagine how he could do such a thing. My handwriting has always been messy, amateurish and what I sometimes consider to be childish. I was cursed with the typical school program of only having one week to learn cursive and was never encouraged to touch it again and never gave myself a reason to follow up with it. So the thought of changing my handwriting from eloquent cursive to scribbles according to each character was a daunting feat.

I still wonder how he did it, but I could just be acting like an idiot. I’m talking about a genius here, but even then I’m sure it’s a lot easier to switch your calligraphy from eloquent to chicken scratch when you already know how to do both. I do notice, however, when looking over my own longhand, changes in its style and appearance depending on the atmosphere of the scene as well as my own emotional state at the time of writing. So maybe that’s how Dostoevsky went about it? He was said to be an incredibly hard worker, someone that approached his writing with extreme focus. So maybe the emotions – erratic, passionate – of his characters were written so perfectly because he could envelope himself into the feelings of his creations.

But that could all be nonsense.

Looking back on these ruminations, my mind tends to wander towards Dostoevsky quite often. I’ve brought up the name to almost every writer I’ve met and my friends have been equally tormented with my love for his work. Despite my love for Moby Dick or Hamlet, Dostoevsky is probably my favorite writer not only because of his books but because he is a writer I’ve struggled with the most. I’ve mentioned before how I was led into the Russian writers work with way too many expectations – told time and again by others of key points to his character and his work that they knew I would love. A lot of them were right, but none of them ever mentioned that Dostoevsky can actually be a difficult writer to read if you don’t really know what you’re getting into.

I started with Notes from Underground, was daunted by it but liked it enough to move onto his other work. I ended up quitting both Crime and Punishment as well as Demons. I blamed writing styles and translations, and for a while was content with approaching these works some other time. I even – dare I say – considered him to be not that great of a writer. But I came back soon after, did my best to forget everything I was told about Dostoevsky and tried again starting from Notes. This time I’ve read them all and would laud these books for hours if I was asked about them. Funny thing is, I still haven’t cracked Dostoevsky. That second time around was still a whirlwind and filled me with enough frustrations and doubts as to make me want to give up all over again, all while being hooked at the same time.

He’s probably the best writer of character that’s ever existed since Shakespeare, perhaps better than the Bard since his characters exist in novel form. His ideas range from the political to the deeply psychological, depicted in various ways from bursts of monologue to gestures here and there. His skill of depicting evil in its lowest and humanity at its highest is enough to make me stop and consider what I’ve read more than any writer. I’ll probably have to write a fully committed essay on Dostoevsky one of these days, maybe these ruminations are just a lead up to that.

Hemingway himself wondered how a writer like Dostoevsky could write so badly yet make one feel so deeply. He hated his style, maybe for the same reasons I did. For me, it was the messiness of it. Characters always on some kind of edge, always shouting, forming half-sentences, beginning and ending conversations between characters without context. But I’ve come to see his style isn’t because he’s a bad writer or because of a bad translation, but that it’s intentional, and I even like it now. He’s not a stylist by any means, and like any writer, Dostoevsky’s style is another way in which to pull a reader into its current and lose yourself with the narrative the same way Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom does the same.

Good news! I’m going back into the workforce. Could this be because the economy is finally taking a turn and there’s work to be done? Who knows! That’s the joy of working for inheritance kids, let’s just hope when they lay me off in order to pay for their next vacation that I’ll have another job lined up. Think I was off for some four months and what a fucking adventure it’s been. Trip to New York for The Republic of Letters year celebration, trip to Atlanta to support Bad Clown Books launching their Masculine collection, a sleep schedule thrown out of whack, wrote four drafts of my novel, a whole play, poems I haven’t been counting, did questionable drugs offered by charitable souls during my domestic and international excursions, went through a move, possibly went insane and went to a wedding.

The grind never ended, but now we’ve got to put it back into order. During the layoff I was getting up anywhere from 5 to 8, one wonders if that’s the schedule my body prefers. Alas, looks like it will be back to the 3am rise and shine for the foreseeable future. I suspect the next few weeks are going to be tough getting back into that old groove. I might even fail a few times, consider altering my schedule all together for something different, might even doubt myself as a writer as I tend to do.

But the doubt doesn’t last forever. You could say it’s stubbornness and in a lot of ways it is but the truth is I wouldn’t have started waking up at 3am for the past two years if I didn’t believe in what I was doing. And maybe it’s going to suck waking up at 3am again for a while or maybe it will continue to suck for as long as I keep with that schedule because, honestly, who the fuck wakes up at 3am and tells themselves they are glad to be doing this? But that’s why you affirm yourself constantly, whether with a journal or motivational YouTube videos, or by talking with writer friends who think alike, or by being a little bit insane. Sometimes I wake up hours before the sun has risen and I know there’s no one else awake other than the tent city folk I sometimes think I get along with more than people in the ‘real world’ and wonder if all these hours and years of saying no and listening only to myself is really worth it and that maybe I should go back to sleep. But I remind myself what the writing is for, whether it’s for myself or others and I look at the work I have on my desk – the next play, the next novel, the notes on a dozen different works that will keep me writing for decades to come – and I keep going back because one: I know what I’m doing is worth it, that these stories will change people, will stop others from committing suicide or help them learn how to love or to make them feel catharsis and two: because I’ve been doing this for fifteen years and it’s all I think about and I don’t know how to do anything else and if I gave up now then what was it all for? So I’ll keep with the 3am schedule if that’s the only time I can get to write and I’ll do that for decades if I have to, even if I die and my work still counts for nothing because I’d rather keep doing what I love than sit in some office writing code while my shoulders roll forward or inhale fentanyl smoke leaking from an outhouse on a new development among people who don’t even know how to read, hate their lives, their spouses and children and only look forward to the next sports game and be content with that.

And I’m here because this place has introduced me to a dozen writers and many of them I even consider my friends and I look at their work or speak to them and I know they’re sincere. I only want to interact and be close with writers/artists that are sincere and to support them and see them succeed because we can’t do this alone like some of us might think. And any other artist that isn’t aligned with me and others in that way I don’t really care about, who is in it ‘just to write’ and to maybe bag some money and wipe their hands rather than supporting a community not only of other artists but of people who can read, view and ponder that art. We all know how enriching it can be to fill your lives with poetry so why not write in order to fill people’s souls with that same richness? I’ve said before I don’t like to speak on these issues with authority, but I like to think I’ve been doing this long enough to notice when I’m talking to a genuine writer. Maybe I might fool myself half the time and these people I cheer and have cheered for will drop off the face of the earth or completely turn their backs to the community but that’s a risk like anything else. But I’d rather get stabbed in the back or – in the internets case – blocked for no apparent reason if a writer I support is able to find their readers and churn out their novel or book of poetry or whatever they feel compelled to write.

Short excerpt from my novel. Thought it worked nicely as a short story. Hope you all enjoy.

He had kept track of some twelve minutes before the acid kicked in. Caught him off guard with a sudden lump of panic to his heart sinking down to his belly chased by goblins whispering C’est la vie but he supposed this was what he asked for. It was about this time when he had a sudden mind to go wandering through the house that was not his, slipping away light-footed and quiet while the rest of them chattered around their table of bottles and coke mirrors.

There were reasons for his need to be alone. Mostly because acid time usually spelled out adventure time, and there were plenty of doors in this house leading to strange places. Now, course he could have gone sneaking off into the dresser drawers for some knickers to pilfer the pockets of or some panties to sniff – but that was sober time requirements. Instead he wandered the halls waiting for the right door to open before him with a blast of winter’s taste across lake swept plains, beckoning him to step off the floorboards into, well, the year 1650 to kneel alongside Etienne Laurent Duboius who tended to stick alone from the camps firelight to watch the whistling horizon snug in his furs and a shade of trees to fight back the wind, musket against his shoulder and a quick reach for his Boucheron, his grizzled beard like wires in the early November cold. From his spot of grass between the trees fighting off the worst of the wind he watched the point of flame penetrating the dark, his fur trading clients who would lay there dreaming of markets – their bundle of beaver hides a torch in the dark on its own. Normally he had whiskey on his person to warm his bones during such a watch, but word of another Mohawk band burning its way up the lake kept him sharp, who had already laid waste to Huronia and sent what few survivors there were limping to the safety of Jesuit walls. They put up a fight, it was said, not that Etienne or any other Frenchman had witnessed it, so quickly did the tide of war sweep over that gentle land. Claims of a few Iroquois captured, tortured, thighs and biceps torn sizzling from bone and devoured as greatest mockery to their enemy. Such acts only gave the Iroquois greater grief, a wail that would be heard from hut to hut until there was nothing left to weep over. Not that they were excluded from the conflict, the black robes flowing across this virgin land like reapers.

Etienne had received blessings from Gabriel Lalemant and considered him a friendly face, one he had even escorted across the bogs and fields and around the belly of Simcoe to help him spread the word before news reached the temporary hovel he chose as his bed that Lalemant had been scalped and baptized with boiling water for his transgressions. A part of Etienne desired to meet the savages that had killed Lalemant and spill their blood in his own personal mourning war. But he knew the chance was unlikely. A war like this was a conveyor belt of death and fire, and who’s to say Lalemant’s murderer was even alive?

In truth Etienne believed he could be nowhere else but here, war or not. The stuffy air of Ville-Marie, the noise and clatter of settlements further along the lakeshore. Too much for him. Not even the France of his mother and father interested him over the untamed reaches of man’s touch, but the war here had long ago turned a bitter taste. If only he could venture farther, perhaps a place where no other man could be found save passing Ojibwe canoes, a mere glimpse drifting through lake fog. He would not need his rifle nor his knives, would not have to watch the trees warily as he passed. The land stretched endlessly around him, the lazy bogs stirred with passing deer bearing eyes like twinkling fireflies. The clouds on such plains shattered and allowed the sky a peek, glowing nimbus with wind hymns praising the setting of the sun and all things fell into darkness save his fire, the grease smell of cooking meat and smoke, the coals flaring red and cracking sparks and the land glowing pale under the moon splotched by tree shadows and a snaking river. He was glad to be out here at this time. In the colder months he could see wolves in the white fields. At times he would hear them howl.

That Fading Ship

But everything aches,
Oh! suffocates,
When the twin springs
Ring like singing dreams
Flowering from memory.

To bend the knee
And make the clouds weep.
Sweet name lost – as a clap in the wind.
How – how do you rent me so easily?

But yet these ribbons slip
From between bleeding fingertips.
The silence between
Those almost touching lips
Watching – saying nothing – that fading ship.

Introduction

A man recalls his little brother.

It used to be one didn’t have to go out into the world afraid like we do now. Used to be you could go out on your own and be home well past dark and no one ever had to worry about their children never coming back.

It was my brother that taught us the world wasn’t as safe as we thought. We were climbing the stones along the shore, tasting the Huron Lake water crashing and misting the air, searching for shells and cleaning up littered trash for a few dollars. He was smiling and leaping from stone to stone and I promised him we’d go get ice cream when we were done. Turned away from him for just a moment to stare at the soaring salt mine that was the life of this town and the cargo ship that would drift from its harbor towards the heart of our small ocean where it would shrink and vanish into the haze. Then he was gone. Searched for him between the stones and called for him, jumped in the water thinking he might have slipped in. But it was like he had vanished. That’s all I could say to my parents, that he was there one second, gone the next.

I ran that whole beach twice, from the burger stand to the pier, calling for him, crying for him. I went to the police last – the officer leaning on his cruiser with his radio turned loud while he watched the sun fall towards the water.

“I’m sure he’s just gone home.”

“He’s too little to go home by himself.”

“You’d be surprised what a kid can do. Go home, he’ll be there.”

I knew he wouldn’t. Why didn’t I fight him on that? It was dark when I left the beach. Each time I turned my back to the water it was like my feet were weighed by stones, something inside me screaming for me to stay and I stayed as long as I could, just hoping he would come up out of nowhere and I could hug him and take him away.

But he never showed. The beach emptied of people and the bright lights of the mine glowed without warmth or color.

I went to the station next but they told me the same.

“He’s probably gone home,” the lady at the front desk said. “You go find him and give him trouble for sneaking off. Besides, you have to wait two days to file a missing person’s.”

My mother knew what it was the moment I stepped inside without him there. I couldn’t look her in the eye, could hardly speak to my father when he came to question me.

“But the lady said we have to wait two days,” following him to the station.

“That’s all a lie so they don’t have to do the work,” was all he said. And I watched him order those badges from their chairs no matter how hard they tried not to.

It was in the papers the next day. But I wasn’t reading the papers. I was out with everyone, searching the forests and ditches and watching the divers sink into the dark water at the tip of the pier – hanging up photos of his likeness that begged him to come home.

The search party only lasted a week. After that the papers stopped talking about him and everything was forgotten save by the police – who did their part but who really knows how hard.

That was around the time they started to blame me for it. They never said it openly, that they blamed me, but I knew they were thinking it.

“You should have been watching him” she told me, hissing it through tears and then crying again – for my brother, for what she had said, maybe for what she felt in her heart in saying it, something that carried no words but sounded like: ‘It should have been you.’

And dinner was so quiet without him there. She could barely eat, stayed in her room most of the time while it was just me and my father. He never blamed me, not out loud. But the silence was enough.

Came to a point over months added onto months where it felt like I was the only one still looking for him. The town went on living like it always had and no one spoke to me like I had lost a brother. The pictures of him stapled to posts throughout town were taken down or left to the lakeside elements, discoloring and fraying and barely hanging on against the wind, forgotten with the rest that would come to cover his bright smile.

So many years now that I can barely remember how many times I went out looking for him – how many hours past dark I would keep searching for him. I came up with all sorts of theories, suspects, places that could be excavated.

I remember one day I went to the station to speak with the sheriff. He knew my name and I knew his and he was kind enough to listen to my next theory as to where he could be. But after hearing it he just shook his head like I was still a child all those years back.

“We’ve done all we could, kid. If he turns up, then he’ll turn up. Sometimes people just aren’t meant to be found. I know you might not like to hear it, but it’s most likely a runaway. At some point you’ll just have to move on from it.”

But how could I just move on when he was my brother? Other people told me the same thing over the years, kept telling me it long after my parents died, who never brought him up in their final years – as if they had forgotten him, or moved on – whichever’s worse.

I still wonder where he could be, if he were still breathing or not. In silence I wonder with the worst dread what his last thoughts may have been when I had vanished from his sight for the last time – if he was afraid or if he was still happily wondering when we’d be done cleaning up so I could take him for ice cream.

Some pennies for a cup of joe if you feel like helping along. If not, just reading my work does so much already.

Buy Me A Coffee

Dancing Here

Stars on the river,
Lips like sugar. Watch the headlights passing
Like Will-O torches splashing
On the twilight mud
After a sudden rain passing.

Touch of cold on the deep city night.
They lean on shadows, watching the wind pass from their windows,
Yearning – never reaching.
We could laugh,
But the wine is black under sunsets smear.
To speak would break the spell.

Some spoilers here and there.

Sad to say I didn’t watch that many movies for most of 2025. Some, sure, but not as much as I used to. Busy year for all things, life and bills to pay and writing. Being here on Substack definitely budded into my movie-watching time but I figured it was a good enough momentary sacrifice.

It wasn’t until a mass lay off that’s somewhat crippling my northern abode that I realized how much I missed sitting down and watching something new and astounding. I might have sighed the first time I laid back to finally dive into my collection of movies to burn through. It’s a different kind of relaxation. Reading books is more work than watching a movie – but a real good film is not an empty thing.

For the first half of this year I’ve read a small dozen plays for fun and to set myself into a certain mood for a play I’ve started working on myself. I don’t know what it is about the aesthetic of a play that’s always attracted me since I first saw one. There’s a magic to theatre that trumps aspects of cinema. I think for me it has to do with the darkness surrounding the actors on a stage, the darkness they equally stare into when reciting their soliloquies. Plays are also a perfect example of minimalism if that’s your thing. I’m sure you could write a play with more detail – maximalist play? – but I think from what I’ve read, the filling out the details comes in the production itself. Otherwise, you could do what Beckett did when writing down the setting of your script like in Waiting For Godot: “A country road. A tree. Evening.”

Here’s a list of what I’ve read this year so far, not including novels:

Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade. Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and Suddenly, Last Summer. The original Marlowe version of Dr. Faustus. Goethe’s Faust: Part One – Part Two I’ve yet to get to – and Jean Genet’s The Maids.

Nothing crazy, really. As for a few others on my shelf, I still need to get to Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Miller’s Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, Lorca’s Three Tragedies, O’Neil’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Genet’s The Blacks and The Balcony.

During the binge, I’ll probably read Shakespeare at some point. Hamlet and the usuals, obviously, but there are a few more I haven’t red yet. I might also reread Oedipus the King and the Oresteia, the latter I’ve not read, among other Ancient Greek plays. Long Days Journey Into Night is something I’ve had on my shelf for quite a while but never approached it yet as I’ve heard it can be quite a depressing tragedy, but I’ll have to try it sometime, right?

Among these plays, I’ve also watched many of the films adapted out of them. All versions are equally praiseworthy. A Streetcar Named Desire among its 1951 film version is an amazing experience. Brando played Stanley’s character in the stage adaption far before the film more than 800 times and it shows. I wish we had footage of what that acting performance was like in those first few to compare his change by the time of the film. All of Williams’ plays are amazing, or those I’ve read. The three plays of his I’ve read border something dreamlike at times. The Glass Menagerie for it being a memory play, but even Blanche’s attitude in Streetcar being one full of magic and whimsy, though easily shattered by Stanley’s outbursts. And then you have the climax of Suddenly, Last Summer, and I don’t even know what to say about that one. Pure pandemonium is a good description, heavy on the Freudianism which always shone through Williams’ other works.

Jean Genet’s The Maids was also a great read and watch. I laughed during most of the reading, then noticed I had laughed more from reading this stack of plays than I have most books. It cold be my fault, for a long time I never felt like humor worked much in a story. Gravity’s Rainbow was a good exception, also parts of Moby Dick here and there. But maybe it’s my own attitude about things, exploring humor in my work and slowly discovering the humor of classics as I’ve gone to reread them. Dostoevsky is full of comedy in each of his books if you choose to read it that way, even McCarthy’s dark humor in recent rereads has pulled a few laughs out of me.

Anyway, The Maids, if anyone is wondering, or cares, is about two sisters who take turns playing as their madame when she is away. They play it as a sort of game, bickering, even striking one another until, by the end, the maid is allowed to let out their anger on the temporary madame. There is even – true to Genet - a sadomasochistic angle to their game. The end goal to this performance is to poison and kill their madame in real life. I won’t spoil much else but both the written play and the movie are fantastic. Glenda Jackson playing as one of the maids steals the show from the moment she begins speaking. It almost gave me a feeling of whiplash to see her act this way as opposed to the stark difference of her role in Marat/Sade. The theme of Genet’s work often involves the body, criminality, queer sexuality and power dynamics. He was a thief in his own day for much of his life, spent years in and out of prison and wrote his work often behind bars. He wrote books before entering theatre, and from what I’ve read many of them are semi-autobiographical, but goddamn is it hard to find him at my used bookstore. Not that he never shows up, as the storeowner always tells me, someone else just comes by to pick him up as soon as he puts his work on the shelf. He’s quite the interesting character and I’m eager to read more about him as well as his work.

The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Claude Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of Marquis de Sade. Or, Marat/Sade, is probably my favorite of these plays I’ve read. It might even be my favorite play and the movie isn’t that far away either. A play within a play in which these asylum inmates perform before another audience, taking place as a fictional debate between the Marquis de Sade and Jean-Claude Marat, with de Sade working as both director and actor. Like Genet, the play explores themes of power dynamics between the high and the low, set in 1808 during the reign of Emperor Napoleon, the play takes us back to the French Revolution in which Marat argues for policies which – by the time of the play – have led and will lead to countless deaths by guillotine, not only of the aristocratic class, but also the citizens the revolutionaries called up arms to originally defend, all while Sade, representing a sort of anarchism, slides into cynicism and nihilism in his arguments against Marat’s perceived utopia through slaughter, supporting the sort of freedom the revolution promised but also criticizing where it eventually leads: to a high aristocratic class and a poor population still struggling to find food. Just another revolving door. It’s philosophical, asking questions surrounding human nature and freedom, all of it presented while the inmates of Charenton sing of their class struggles that never really change. Being that every actor in Sade’s play is an inmate of Charenton, the performance often dissolves into lunacy and disorder – occasional bursts of laughter in the background between another’s line, stopped by orderlies dressed as nuns and occasionally shut down by the director of the asylum himself to warn Sade about other actors using censored lines.

Photos of various stage productions of Marat/Sade are outstanding and I long for one to be performed close enough for me to see it. The film is another wonder. Sade is brilliantly acted by Patrick Magee and Glenda Jackson once again shows off her skills as Corday as if it were easy – a character suffering from melancholy and sleeping spells, who stutters and speaks softly; a far cry from the furious and sniveling Solange in The Maids. The way they use the setting of the asylum bathhouse as a stage, using various props to mimic the sound of a guillotine with various inmates dropping into a pit to appear like a pile of heads. Outstanding stuff, perfect performances. Oh, I didn’t even mention it’s a musical. The way the play is written – almost Jacobean – lets you fall into the rhythm of the various songs throughout with ease, even coming with song sheets if a reader wanted to get the full picture in their head.

In my edition, Peter Weiss gives a much-admired historical background of the play I wasn’t aware of. Turns out Sade, who spent much of his life in prison and insane asylums for the vulgarity of his work and a dozen heinous crimes – even ordered to be placed under arrest by Napoleon himself – would produce his own plays while locked up in Charenton. Apparently they were quite a specialty and were even attended by aristocrats from all over France. All in all, Marat/Sade is an amazing play and a very quick read, could even finish it in a day.

Some more banger films for you. Funny thing is, and I don’t know if this is because I’ve been reading so many plays in a row, but my favorite films of this collection present themselves as a plays on their own. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover was the most glaring. Besides the stage play comparisons, every shot is like a damned painting. Wide, taking up whole rooms with colors from greens to reds and white filling the screen. The clothing design is perfect, the color of a character’s clothes even changing depending on which room they’re in to deepen the emotions of each scene. The musical score is spell binding, composed by Michael Nyman, it sets the tone from the very first shot and adds to this tension throughout the film that only eases off just a little throughout at times, but never truly goes away until the very end. This tension is also heightened thanks to the outstanding acting, the thief of the film particularly also stealing the show like Glenda Jackson does in her roles. Albert Spica, played by (Dumbledore) Michael Gambon – holy shit, what amazing acting. He plays a vulgar criminal who has recently taken over the restaurant most of the movie is set in. Every night he dines there with his thugs, fighting – sometimes physically – with the staff and other patrons, effectively scaring off the clientele. He’s loud, obnoxious, violent and unpredictable. He never stops talking! He brings along his wife, Georgina, played by Helen Mirren, and constantly abuses her both verbally and physically throughout the runtime, all while she spots another man dining in the restaurant and takes him as her lover. As I was trying to explain earlier, the film is the kind that grips you at once from the moment it starts and never let’s go, leaving you – it certainly did me – with a sigh of relief when it’s finally over.

Two other films I want to glorify real quick, which also reminded me of plays. Iranian films, Taste of Cherry and It Was Just An Accident. No, I’m not watching them because of what’s going on in the world currently, I’ve just had them on my list for years and have yet to get into Iranian cinema out of others, so you can fuck off regarding any opinions. I’m still fresh on It was Just An Accident so I probably won’t go too deep. It’s about a man who takes matters into his own hands when he recognizes the squeaking of a man’s prosthetic leg as that of his past torturer. Yet, filled with doubt, he goes to find other political prisoners who suffered similar abuse by the same man to confirm whether it is really him or not before carrying out his other plans. Let me just ramble on a bit more about theatre to be annoying – you could see this movie on a stage no problem. There’s even a reference to Waiting For Godot. At one point the characters of the movie are all sitting around waiting and pondering, spread out across the screen in various poses that stuck out to me as something you’d see on a stage. This could also have to do with the more “subtle” its director, Jafa Panahi, had to film it due to the state of filmmaking in the country. Wonderful film, one I was never bored watching, all of it leading up to a perfect climax and a final scene that sticks with you.

Taste of Cherry doesn’t so much as present itself as a play but you can see how it could be acted out that way. It’s a simple film, minimal, if you want to call it that. It follows a man driving around the city looking to hire someone that will bury his body after he’s committed suicide. That’s as much as I’d like to go into the story as it’s an incredibly beautiful movie and I think you should see it. I think it’s the way the film approaches the idea of life and death that grips me so much. The idea of paying someone to bury you after you’ve done something so far as killing yourself. There’s something unique in how it approaches and ponders the idea of death, as well as life and beauty and poetry – even the taste of cherries. I can’t quite put the feeling to words. It approaches death in a unique way almost like Salieri’s ambitions in Amadeus. Not that they have the same goals, but it’s the concept that tickles me so much. Salieri, who feels slighted by God because of Mozart’s – who he describes as divinely gifted – talent, seeking to destroy him in order to perform Mozart’s own symphony as an insult to God. I don’t know, it’s amazing stuff and I realized I’ve fallen into a tangent. But you should watch Taste of Cherry, especially if you’re feeling the itch for some beauty if you choose to watch it that way.

That’s all I got. Has anyone here read or seen any of the work I mentioned here? Have a play or movie you’d like to recommend? Throw it my way. What’s the aesthetic you’re attracted to most in theatre? Or have you read or seen Marat/Sade? I feel like after all my gushing for Pedro Paramo that I need to start plugging this one to death, but we’ll see.

Later.

I Wander, Blind

It surges again!
Oh, how brightly it sings!
Your fingers graze
The lip of the sky
And take me into your wings!

Where were you? What blessed shawls
Concealed you from my eye?
Weaved from the threads of heaven
If they would grace your shoulders
And hide you like marble
Cloaked in earth and weeds.

I hear shutters creak,
The air darkens. I wander, blind.
My breath wastes – to remember – your fading divine.

For when I wake and find you gone
My body rises, blinking,
Stumbling towards the dawn.