This just in — virile and well learned people from all around continue to enjoy Annalemma Issue Seven: Endurance…

J.A. Tyler @ Big Other

Jason Diamond @ Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Ravi Mangla @ Ravi Mangla

Paul Kwiatkowski @ Street Carnage

Nick @ Nick Ripatrazone

Looks like Annalemma Issue Seven: Endurance has been popping up around the internet. Lots of very attractive and intelligent people seem to be enjoying it, which is fantastic news.

Zachary Zezima

Dark Sky Mag

Amber Sparks

Where the Sea Meets the Sky

Have you got your copy yet? Let’s see some pics!

Patrick deWitt‘s debut novel, Ablutions (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), spiraled readers into the whiskey soaked underbelly of Hollywood bars beyond any semblance of celebrity or glamor culture. His follow-up, The Sisters Brothers (Ecco, May 2011), takes place in Gold Rush era Oregon, following assassins Eli and Charlie Sisters, on their journey to California to dispatch an inventor. He also wrote the script for the upcoming teen dark comedy Terri, directed by Azazel Jacobs. DeWitt’s story appearing in Annalemma Issue Seven: Endurance, The Worst Thing My Father Did in His Life, concerns a man recounting a horrible act to his son over breakfast. This interview was conducted via email.

Annalemma: The father in this story engages in some pretty horrible behavior. A lot of your characters are prone to doing truly bad things. What’s interesting about people committing awful acts?

Patrick deWitt: I come from a long line of unabashed gossips, and addressing your question from that point of view, I can say that unpleasant behavior makes for a superior topic to pleasant behavior. I’ve been losing interest in wholly terrible people lately, actually, and have taken an interest in partially terrible people. They’re not as exciting, but easier to be around.

A: Saying something’s an awful act is a bit of a judgment call. What’s awful to one person is acceptable to another. It seems like the father and the son in this story are seeing it from both an angles. They laugh about these terrible things the father did, maybe out of some male bonding instinct, then they immediately feel remorse. What constitutes an awful act?

PD: I guess it could be defined as a hurtful happening that could have easily been avoided but wasn’t for reasons of laziness or selfishness. So yes, the act in the story absolutely qualifies as awful.

A: The awful act in question is perpetrated against a woman. What do you see this story saying, if anything, about the way men treat women in this country? In this generation?

PD: I wouldn’t intentionally address any ideological platform in my fiction for the same reason I wouldn’t put an ideological bumper sticker on my car — because it would fill me with a sense of futility. And it’s crucial that I feel just the opposite when writing. What happens in the story is despicable, but it’s not there to illuminate an opinion or take anyone to task. Commentary is someone else’s job.

A: Even though I knew from the beginning that that father was going to do something terrible, his bravado made him attractive, funny even. What is it about assholes that make people gravitate toward them?

PD: Assholes lead exciting lives! Their days are filled with wild feelings and insane miscommunications. Also, they’re typically solitary or independent, and human nature leads us to seek the favor of people who can take it or leave it.

A: Let’s talk about some stuff happening down the road. According to the IMDB page, Terri is in post production. Can you talk about that at all?

PD: Only to say that it was an honor to work with such a talented group of people, and that I’m proud to call Azazel Jacobs my friend.

A: The Sisters Brothers takes place in Gold Rush era Oregon. How much research was involved when you sat down to write historical fiction and how did the writing process differ form Ablutions?

PD: The research process was not what you would call rigorous. Basically, I read one Louis L’Amour novel (Heller With a Gun), and looked at the pictures in a Time-Life book called The Forty-Niners. There were times I needed specific information (How many hands tall is a tall horse? What are the habits of North American beavers?) and would poke around online or at the library for an hour, but this happened surprisingly rarely. I wound up making up a lot of stuff, actually — sayings, names of weapons, means of communication, towns. I never felt any obligation to keep to the facts, and when the facts upset the narrative, then the facts went out the window.
The process differed between books in that with Ablutions I was pulling from a concrete, real-world place I knew intimately, whereas with The Sisters Brothers I had to envision and imagine and empathize. I had to get to know the characters well enough that I would know what they might do in a given situation. Also, TSB is more story-driven, while Ablutions was more tone-driven or whatever — more a series of portraits rather than a series of interlinked, propulsive happenings.

A: Genre writing is like porn. Literary writers pretend like they’re above it, but they devour it in large quantities when they think no one’s looking. Where do you think this stigma against genre comes from?

PD: Maybe it seems like a crutch to have a fully realized setting as the starting point, but speaking personally, this book wasn’t any easier to tackle in spite of the backdrop. If there’s a problem with genre, it’s that the authors so rarely rise above the inherent conceits. But it’s not as though every work of literary fiction is hitting a home run, either, you know? Oftentimes I have a reaction when I read something that pushes or allegedly pushes boundaries: I wonder if the author could tell a straight story. I was wondering the same thing about myself, which is one of the reasons I wrote The Sisters Brothers, as a challenge, or test.

This sweet baby is shipping today to folks who pre-ordered and subscribers. Noteworthy features:

Joe Meno asks what your favorite war is.

Patrick deWitt presents an old man doing a terrible thing.

Matthew Simmons talks to God.

Zora Neale Hurston inspires you yet again.

A portion of the proceeds of this issue go directly to The Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts, an organization dedicated showcasing the work of artists of African descent.

Being a part of the best thing we’ve ever made is only a couple clicks away.

One woman whirlwind of words, Amelia Gray, rained a firestorm of flavor all over Brooklyn this week. Here she is at WORD bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, (which is a bookstore that it is so good that it makes you want to punch other bookstores for not being as good) reading a piece about everyone’s favorite Chinese American mother/daughter novelist, Amy Tan.

As you’ll notice, I missed the first sentence because I couldn’t take my camera out of my pocket fast enough. Here is a re-enactment of that first sentence that took place over rye whiskey and oatmeal cookies at Sasha and Skyler’s.

This is a piece that Amelia read just for Skyler. No one was informed that this was being videoed. This was an intimate moment that was captured with no one’s permission.

I know who you are. You are a person who lives in Central Florida and loves empanadas. You are a person who loves delicious wine. You are a person who loves to read. You have a deep and ferocious love for the small, yet potent, arts and culture scene in your town. Most of all, you like free things. Guess what, friend. We’re hooking you up.

We’re celebrating the release of Annalemma Issue Seven: Endurance next month in Eatonville. We will see you there.

For the past 40 years neuroscientist Louann Brizendine has been studying the differences between male and female human brains and in the process has washed away centuries of archaic views on how female brain chemistry works. Until relatively recently it was assumed by psychologists that men’s larger brain size meant that men were the superior sex. “For much of the 20th century,” Brizendine states, “(t)hat assumption has been at the heart of enduring misunderstandings about female psychology and physiology.” According to Brizendine, men and women’s brain chemistries are vastly different, men’s being glacially slow and severe like geology, women’s being swift and unpredictable like the weather.

Brizendine introduces the cast of neurochemical and hormonal characters at work in the female brain. The ones behind feminine behavior (estrogen and progesterone) and the ever changing cocktail that influence more complex behavior (testosterone and oxytocin)  and how they all play a role in shaping the perspective of a woman and thus, her reality. The purpose of this book is to grasp an understanding of how a woman’s brain chemistry can shape the way she sees the world. For example, a source of great fear and anxiety for a woman is the possibility loosing a dear friend or being ostracized by a peer group or network of friends. Brizendine posits that this fear is activated by ancient brain wiring telling the female that she needs her group of female friends in order to band together to protect themselves from aggressive males or any other potential threat.

The book is structured through the different developmental stages of a woman’s life (birth and girlhood, the teenage years, love and sexual development, motherhood and eventually menopause) and tracks the chemical and hormonal changes taking place during those pivotal times. Brizendine says that brain wiring is essentially scrapped and new wiring is made at each of these transitional times, radically changing who a woman is. She illustrates points through cases of patients she treats at the Women’s Mood and Hormone Clinic, part of UC San Francisco’s psychiatry department. She goes on to say that most women who come to see her don’t really know why they feel like either bursting into tears or blighting someone’s head off. “If we acknowledge that our biology is influenced by other factors,” Brizendine states, “including out sex hormones and their flux, we can prevent it from creating a fixed reality by which we are ruled.”

If Brizendine can be criticized for anything it’s coming from this place of slight disdain for they way men are. According to Brizendine, our testosterone-soaked brains make us problematic. We’re terse and aggressive and cruel, but we can’t help it cause our brains are soaked in testosterone. While scientifically the testosterone levels may be true, this perspective seems like a fundamentally ignorant place to start from. She mentions talents that come natural to women like, “a nearly psychic ability to read faces and tone of voice for emotions and states of mind,” are not talents that men, by and large, are capable of possessing. The brain being an infinitely complex and mysterious organ, it’s hard to believe that such talents couldn’t be learned or explored but Brizendine’s hardline stance doesn’t allow for that.

If you love women, but they drive you crazy sometimes, you need to read this book. If you don’t love women because they drive you crazy, you need to read this book. Also, you probably don’t love yourself for some reason and you should probably look into that.

Rule #32 of the internet: if there aren’t pics, it didn’t happen. These days, our actions aren’t validated without documentation. You can plan for a party all you want, but if you forget your camera, it may as well be happening in the Arctic Circle. Thankfully the long arm of Electric Literature can always be counted on to pick up the slack.

Personal Observations:

– When there’s Draper and Schwartzman to be watched on a Sunday night in a warm apartment, people will instead come in droves to a tiny bar in Brooklyn to watch poets read. This is a shocking.

– The crowd loves Sasha Fletcher. They respond to his calls. They do what he tells them to do.

– When Ben Mirov gives people a choice between Sadness and Confusion, people will choose Confusion.

– Melissa Broder is a delightful co-host.

– Lauren Ireland wears amazing tights.

– Krystal Languell would like to destroy Florida. This is upsetting.

– While the poets get sad and ruminative, Paul Kwiatkowski does drugs with an ex-con, ex-girlfriend.

– Despite their drummer falling asleep in the van, Adam Robinson‘s band, Sweatpants, is a cathartic exercise in garage rock.

– John Madera can play guitar and drums.

– Jesse Hlebo is much taller in person than in photos.

– David Peak is a tireless supporter of the scene.

– Dylan Suher takes his name being misspelled in print in stride.

– Rose Wind Jerome cheers on her friends even in the face of death.

– Greg Gerke and John Dermot Woods are going to get their asses handed to them this Friday at the Monkey Bicycle Reading.

– Friends who don’t normally come to readings should be thanked profusely. Thank you Anna, Emily, David, Cara, Brent, Sandra, Kristen and Margaret.

– A digital camera is usually hiding in a forgotten corner of a messenger bag. This will be revealed the day after the event requiring documentation.

There is a party this Sunday. The purpose is to celebrate beautiful words and images that have been made here. Many people are very excited about this. So much so that they have been designing posters of their very own. The count is up to three.

Melissa Broder‘s design:

And Adam Robinson‘s entry:

I am going to be there having a good time. If you would like to be there and have a good time as well, come join.

Congratulations to our nominees for Dzanc’s Best of the Web 2011 Anthology. We’ve published some damn good stories here on the site this year, but these are three that will leave a mark on you…

What She Had by Alice Benson

Sea Monster by Ben Loory

Sofianne by Nick Antosca

Thanks to Alice, Ben and Nick for trusting Annalemma with their work and thanks to Dzanc for devoting time and resources to online writing.