Last night I had a really nice, relaxed time at the launch party for Stress City: A Big Fat Book of Fiction by 51 DC Guys at Politics and Prose. The newest anthology pulled together by editor Richard Peabody over at Paycock Press, it includes fiction by the likes of Matt Kirkpatrick, RIchard McCann and yours truly.
It was a great turnout. I got there about ten minutes early and counted 82 heads, but more came after I got there. Considering DC residents often leave DC in the summer to make way for tourists and that it was a Friday night it was a real testament to both Peabody and the writing community of DC in general.
Because it would have been crazy to have 51 people read from their work----we'd still probably be there---nine of the contributors read small sections from their stories. From Brian Gilmore's tale about a lawyer named Funk to Richard McCann's elegy of a dead lover via memories of a gay bar to Dave Housely's Avant Pop twist on the old Davy and Goliath cartoon, they really showed the broad spectrum of the kind of writing that goes on in this town. And I'm happy to say not one of the pieces were political thrillers. Other readers included RR Angell, Juan H. Gaddis, Charles R. Larson, Alex MacLennan, David Nicholson, and Jim Patterson.
The reading was followed up by a Q+A session moderated by poet Rose Solari and author Jim Patterson. Questions raised were the solitary nature of men in fiction, the lack of issues like gender strife and parental issues that often appear in the work of women, how mean "deal" with problems instead of just "cope", and how writing and art in general let men to enter modes of introspection and intimacy that men don't normally allow themselves to enter. Reading those I know it all sounds very serious but it was all fairly light-hearted and fun.
Afterwards I caught up with a couple of people I haven't seen in awhile and picked up a couple extra things from the shelves of the bookstore. I even had a nice older couple ask me to sign their copy of the anthology when they found out I have a piece in the book. It was great feeling part of a writing community again, even in a very small way. Once I find my full time job and get myself settled in our near Baltimore that's one of the things high on my list to seek out. While I brought a camera, I sadly neglected to included working batteries. If other sites put up pics I'll update here with some links.
Anways, I highly recommend the book. If you're interested you can probably pick it up in person at places like Politics and Prose and the Writer's Center, and you can also order it via Amazon.
Excelsior.
Showing posts with label Richard Peabody. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Richard Peabody. Show all posts
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Saturday, August 04, 2007
Shameless Plug
This month's Harp Magazine has a nice review of the Hendrix-inspired anthology Kiss the Sky, edited by Richard Peabody. I'm quite flattered that my own story is mentioned in the review. Congrats to Richard and everyone in the book---if you haven't picked it up yet, please do. It's a lot of fun.
After I get off work at 5 pm, Miss L and I set off for the wilds of Memphis, TN. We're driving, which is great because I love a good road trip. Hopefully I'll stumble across some good stories and photographs to share. My computer access might be a little sketchy, but I'll update as I can over the next week.
Excelsior
After I get off work at 5 pm, Miss L and I set off for the wilds of Memphis, TN. We're driving, which is great because I love a good road trip. Hopefully I'll stumble across some good stories and photographs to share. My computer access might be a little sketchy, but I'll update as I can over the next week.
Excelsior
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
What I Did on Valentine's Day
If you have a significant other chances are you celebrated Valentine's Day by bringing your sweetie some choice aluminum balloons, candy hearts and heading out to dinner. Even if you don't have an official significant other you might have felt the pressure and made a date. But then if you're me and your significant other is spurning everything to do with Valentine's Day this year, you spend it with your other love: books.
Yesterday Chapters Books hosted the lunchtime launch party and reading for Sex & Chocolate, the newest anthology from Gargoyle Magazine editors Lucinda Ebersole and Richard Peabody. Fortunately I work right around the corner, so slipping out for an hour was easy. Much like Alice Redux, another anthology Peabody edited and released earlier this year, S & C was put all together back in 1998 and surprisingly bounced from publisher to publisher. I say surprisingly because the theme seems perfect. Ebersole and Peabody finally decided to put it out themselves through their own Paycock Press. By the way: a fabulous cover.
It was a nice, jovial crowd at the reading. Many were decked out in Candy Heart Red sweaters or ties, and those that weren't donning the proper colors were making jokes about sex, chocolate, and sex with chocolate. The mood was lifted even further by the champagne provided by Peabody and Ebersole and chocolate provided by the Parks Sisters Chocolate Chocolate Shop.
Readers included R.R. Angell, Jodi Bloom, Moira Egan, and Deirdra McAfee. If the work I heard is any indication, it looks to be a book filled with material that's good, light-hearted, racy fun. But well written good, light-hearted, racy fun. I wanted to stick around after the reading and mingle with the couple of people I knew there, but sadly the reading finished right at 2:00 and I had to rush back to my little office hovel before the Ogres with their snapping whips started policing the streets for me.
After work I went to the monthly meeting for the mag I review for and got a little bit of bad news. The mag itself is based in NY City, but those in the D.C./Baltimore area all meet out in Chantilly, Va. once a month to discuss our reviews and pick up new books for the month. The mag is shifting the meeting location to California, so unless they are providing a jet plane it's not real likely I'll be going anymore. I will still get material in the mail to review, but it will be things they think I like. Which is always a little odd, having someone else dictate your own taste to you. In a way it's probably a good thing. Now that I'm back in school I have less time to read, and if I do have extra time I can review for other places or even, dare I say it, write my own fiction.
BTW, if you forgot to celebrate Valentine's Day yesterday, I suggest the Burlesque show at the Ottobar tonight in Baltimore, featuring Trixie Little and the Evil Hate Monkey. I saw their V-Day show last year and it was well worth it.
Excelsior.
Yesterday Chapters Books hosted the lunchtime launch party and reading for Sex & Chocolate, the newest anthology from Gargoyle Magazine editors Lucinda Ebersole and Richard Peabody. Fortunately I work right around the corner, so slipping out for an hour was easy. Much like Alice Redux, another anthology Peabody edited and released earlier this year, S & C was put all together back in 1998 and surprisingly bounced from publisher to publisher. I say surprisingly because the theme seems perfect. Ebersole and Peabody finally decided to put it out themselves through their own Paycock Press. By the way: a fabulous cover.
It was a nice, jovial crowd at the reading. Many were decked out in Candy Heart Red sweaters or ties, and those that weren't donning the proper colors were making jokes about sex, chocolate, and sex with chocolate. The mood was lifted even further by the champagne provided by Peabody and Ebersole and chocolate provided by the Parks Sisters Chocolate Chocolate Shop.
Readers included R.R. Angell, Jodi Bloom, Moira Egan, and Deirdra McAfee. If the work I heard is any indication, it looks to be a book filled with material that's good, light-hearted, racy fun. But well written good, light-hearted, racy fun. I wanted to stick around after the reading and mingle with the couple of people I knew there, but sadly the reading finished right at 2:00 and I had to rush back to my little office hovel before the Ogres with their snapping whips started policing the streets for me.
After work I went to the monthly meeting for the mag I review for and got a little bit of bad news. The mag itself is based in NY City, but those in the D.C./Baltimore area all meet out in Chantilly, Va. once a month to discuss our reviews and pick up new books for the month. The mag is shifting the meeting location to California, so unless they are providing a jet plane it's not real likely I'll be going anymore. I will still get material in the mail to review, but it will be things they think I like. Which is always a little odd, having someone else dictate your own taste to you. In a way it's probably a good thing. Now that I'm back in school I have less time to read, and if I do have extra time I can review for other places or even, dare I say it, write my own fiction.
BTW, if you forgot to celebrate Valentine's Day yesterday, I suggest the Burlesque show at the Ottobar tonight in Baltimore, featuring Trixie Little and the Evil Hate Monkey. I saw their V-Day show last year and it was well worth it.
Excelsior.
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
Covering Alice
There are two basic methods for a band to play a cover song. The first is to attempt a note-for-note, beat-for-beat reproduction of what appears on the original record. This method is probably most done by weekend warrior style bands punching out versions of “Mustang Sally” and “Freebird”. The second method is for a band to play with the song through any number of methods (adding effects, changing the tempo, adding your own guitar solo) to the point that you make the song their own. The Hendrix version of “All Along the Watchtower” is a perfect example; his version is so solidly Hendrix that a good number of people aren’t even aware that it’s originally a Bob Dylan tune.
A few years ago editor Richard Peabody sent out a battle cry to the lit world to create short fiction inspired by or about Lewis Carroll, Alice, and her adventures in Wonderland. The new anthology Alice Redux: New Stories of Alice, Lewis and Wonderland collects the best of what Peabody received and is a perfect example of the second method of covering another artist’s material. Thirty-one works in all, each piece spins the material on its head and showcases the unique talents and interests of the contributing author. Running from s/f to fantasy to realism to cutting edge experimental work, the broad range of fiction in this book is a testament to Peabody's own broad taste and editorial eye for picking out solid work, no matter what the style or genre.
Victoria Podpan’s “Looking through the Glass” uses pieces of Carroll’s work as a fantasy place for two small girls to run to and escape some very real world terrors. “Alice and Huck Got Married” by Miles David Moore works as a literary mash-up of sorts, showing us what might happen if Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn married Carroll’s Alice. A few, like Jeffrey M. Bockman’s “The Golden Afternoon” and Suzy Sherman’s “Forever Alice”, take the realistic route by showing other facets of the real lives of Alice Liddell and Charles Dodgson, the real man behind the pen name Lewis Carroll.
A handful of pieces come pretty close to Carroll’s witty word play and odd sense of symbolism. Robert Coover’s “Alice in the Time of the Jabberwock” shows Alice returning to Wonderland as an adult while Jeff Noon’s “Automated Alice” pushes a confused and desperate Alice through a fabulous Wonderland version of life-after-death. While they owe a lot to the original vision and style of Carroll’s work, both authors bring enough of themselves (Noon manages to work in some fun references to his novel Vurt) to make the pieces uniquely their own.
Although this book is a rare exception in that I really enjoyed every piece, there are some works that won’t appeal to everyone. “Alice Undermined” by C M Dupree works as a brilliant piece of philosophy that focuses on a fabulously surreal and absurd moment of Alice balancing on a wall a la Humpty Dumpty. Lance Olsen’s “A Brief History of the Charles Scrolls” and “Alice Doesn’t Live (T)here Any More” by Doug Rice are both tight, brilliantly crafted, language driven pieces of literary terrorism tearing apart the very ideas of what Alice and Carroll are. All three I found fabulous, but their experimental nature might not appeal to a more general audience. But with so much other material that should, like Wonderland itself Alice Redux as a whole really has a bit of something for everyone.
Excelsior.
A few years ago editor Richard Peabody sent out a battle cry to the lit world to create short fiction inspired by or about Lewis Carroll, Alice, and her adventures in Wonderland. The new anthology Alice Redux: New Stories of Alice, Lewis and Wonderland collects the best of what Peabody received and is a perfect example of the second method of covering another artist’s material. Thirty-one works in all, each piece spins the material on its head and showcases the unique talents and interests of the contributing author. Running from s/f to fantasy to realism to cutting edge experimental work, the broad range of fiction in this book is a testament to Peabody's own broad taste and editorial eye for picking out solid work, no matter what the style or genre.
Victoria Podpan’s “Looking through the Glass” uses pieces of Carroll’s work as a fantasy place for two small girls to run to and escape some very real world terrors. “Alice and Huck Got Married” by Miles David Moore works as a literary mash-up of sorts, showing us what might happen if Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn married Carroll’s Alice. A few, like Jeffrey M. Bockman’s “The Golden Afternoon” and Suzy Sherman’s “Forever Alice”, take the realistic route by showing other facets of the real lives of Alice Liddell and Charles Dodgson, the real man behind the pen name Lewis Carroll.
A handful of pieces come pretty close to Carroll’s witty word play and odd sense of symbolism. Robert Coover’s “Alice in the Time of the Jabberwock” shows Alice returning to Wonderland as an adult while Jeff Noon’s “Automated Alice” pushes a confused and desperate Alice through a fabulous Wonderland version of life-after-death. While they owe a lot to the original vision and style of Carroll’s work, both authors bring enough of themselves (Noon manages to work in some fun references to his novel Vurt) to make the pieces uniquely their own.
Although this book is a rare exception in that I really enjoyed every piece, there are some works that won’t appeal to everyone. “Alice Undermined” by C M Dupree works as a brilliant piece of philosophy that focuses on a fabulously surreal and absurd moment of Alice balancing on a wall a la Humpty Dumpty. Lance Olsen’s “A Brief History of the Charles Scrolls” and “Alice Doesn’t Live (T)here Any More” by Doug Rice are both tight, brilliantly crafted, language driven pieces of literary terrorism tearing apart the very ideas of what Alice and Carroll are. All three I found fabulous, but their experimental nature might not appeal to a more general audience. But with so much other material that should, like Wonderland itself Alice Redux as a whole really has a bit of something for everyone.
Excelsior.
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