Yesterday I talked about my friend Jason and the inspiration for the Issue Eight: Creation, but he’s not the only piece of the puzzle. Meet Lloyd Kahn, also a role model for this issue. We’re trying hook up an interview with him. Until then, watch this short doc on him and what he does and be excited.
I was in Orlando for a thing that ended up not happening so I went to see my friend Jason Gregory who runs a wildly successful leather goods company called MAKR.
He’s been doing well, so he had to bust down the wall of the space next to him and expand into this tasty realm.
Jason was actually the inspiration for the creation issue. He sent me a text that said, “You should do an issue of Annalemma that’s all about making things.” I texted him back, “That’s a great idea.” And here we are.
I’m jealous of Jason’s wild success with his brand and his beautiful space with his antique mid-century furniture.
But whenever I get jealous I remember a scene from Seven Years in Tibet where Lhakpa Tsamchoe’s character says to Brad Pitt’s character, “A friend’s good fortune is a blessing. I’m sorry you resent ours.”
The workshop.
The bookshelf. Well, well, well. What do we have on the bottom shelf…
Jason will need something, like a coat hook, and make a design, get it a limited run manufactured and then sell them all. Once they’re sold, they’re gone, never to be made again.
Enough gushing, you get the idea. The dude makes rad stuff. We had an editorial meeting and it went well, gave us a lot of focus and I’m very excited about the direction of all this. It’s making me feel real good inside.
The man and his big ass desk.
Unrealted: new Brice at Stardust. Thanks, Orlando, for being rad.
Apart from the most obvious and convenient point of purchase (at your door in 4 or 5 days!) Annalemma Issue Seven: Endurance can be found in your local indipendent book and curio stores. Don’t see a store near you? Shout it out in the comments and we’ll make it happen.
Manhattan Beach, CA
Denver, CO
Miami, FL
Orlando, FL
Atlanta, GA
Dubuque, IA
Iowa City, IA
Chicago, IL
Louisville, KT
Carmichael’s Bookstore (bonus)
Amherst, MA
Cambridge, MA
Boston, MA
Fitchburg, MA
Baltimore, MD
Portland, ME
St. Louis, MO
Missoula, MT
Chapel Hill, NC
Internationalist Books & Community Center
Metuchen, NJ
Brooklyn, NY
Buffalo, NY
Ithica, NY
New York, NY
Portland, OR
Delaware, OH
Pittsburg, PA
Providence, RI
Austin, TX
Richmond, VA
Bellingham, WA
Seattle, WA
CANADA
Ottawa, ON
NOVA SCOTIA
Halifax
{image via}
The deal: I’ve been working on another project that’s been stealing time away from Anna. I’ve got more time for Anna now so we’re going to be putting more work into the Creation issue, starting with pushing back the deadline. Submissions have been a bit sluggish, probably because we haven’t promoted it all that great. I should have sent out a press release announcing the new theme but I didn’t get around to doing that until today.
So I’m pushing back the deadline to April 5th in the hopes you’re working on something bad ass that you need more time on or maybe give you the opportunity to spark some ideas for something bad ass.
Like I said before, we’re looking for mainly nonfiction for this issue. Something we are very interested in reading about: people making things. I love watching it, I love learning the process. Doesn’t matter what it is, motorbikes to Motorola’s, compost to complex algorithms, if you can explain how something is made in an interesting way then you’ve got my attention. If you can weave it into a narrative, even better. If you can weave it into context that defines who we are as human beings and where we’re headed as a species then you’ve probably got an award winning piece of writing on your hands.
There will be a one or two slots open for fiction submissions so competition will be very tight.
So… what you got?
After almost a year (a fucking year? really?) I finally got around to posting bios from the print issue contributors. Apologies if you were in the print issue and were at a party and told someone you were in the print issue of this bad ass journal and the person you were talking to went home and got on the internet to google-proofed your story and thought that you were a goddamned liar and then started telling people you were a goddamned liar and next thing you know everyone hates you and you’re living in a box. Sorry about that.
Also, contributor Paul Kwiatkowski got a shout out at the Paris Review blog for his essay Lions that first appeared in Issue Seven.
Also, we need artists. If you are an artist or know an artist and would like to illustrate a story we’re running on the web then email me at chris {at} annalemma {dot} net and I will probably like what you do.
Donald by Eric Martin and Stephen Elliott
What if Donald Rumsfeld got caught up in the state-sanctioned torture machine he helped design? That’s the premise of Eric Martin and Stephen Elliott’s short novel Donald. The main character is abducted in the middle of the night by a clandestine military group who take him to an undisclosed location where they begin a series of esotheric interrogations. It’s unclear what they want, and before the main character can even discern if he can give it to him, he’s taken to a Guantanimo-like facility where he becomes a prisoner of war he helped create. Events soon blur together, interrogation sessions become more clouded in mystery and alliances with guards and prisoners are formed quickly and dissolved just as fast.
Martin and Elliott have done an impressive thing considering the audience they’re catering to, considering the goal they’re trying to achieve. They’ve made the character of Donald into a person you sympathize with, a person you feel for and relate to and root for even though you don’t agree with his actions, his rationale, or his worldview. It would have been easy to take Donald at face value, to play up the caricature, to feed into the liberal desire to burn him at the stake. Of course, the premise of the book is hurling Donald into the downward spiral of confusing madness that is the military torture machine. The book borders on tedious as the interrogations become maddeningly repetitive and unproductive, but that comes with the territory when you’re trying to mimic the feeling of psychological torture.
People often question the importance of fiction. What’s its role? Is it relevant? What’s the point? Novels like this, ones that make clear, unflinching, political statements (ones that have the balls to come out on the same day as Rumsfeld’s true memoir) seem to be the answer to that question.
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn
This was the one that was everywhere when it came out. The one that was on all the book club lists, the one everyone was reading, even if they didn’t read all that much, even the people who only read three or four books a year, this was the one. I missed it. I missed it cause I was snobbish when this book came out. I was arrogant enough to think that I knew something that everyone else didn’t because I wasn’t going to get sucked into the hype train. What a dumbfuck mode to be in. What a willfully ignorant, up-my-own-ass-for-no-good-reason mode to be in. What mistake to miss out on a book like this because I’m stuck in this mode of thinking that I’m somehow better than someone else. What a waste of time it is to think like this. Think about how much this book could have taught you with its tight and powerful vignettes adding up to a monumental story. Think about all the time you wasted thinking you were hot shit when you were so much the opposite.
DMZ Vol.1: On the Ground by Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli
In the not-too-distant future, anti-social militias that pepper the country (once thought of as bastions of crazy inbred woods folk) awake like a sleeping giant and topple the US government. The borough of Manhattan becomes a Demilitarized Zone, where chaos reigns and no one has any concept of what life is like, where rumors end and fact begins. Inexperienced photojournalism intern Matty Ross is thrown headlong into answering these questions as his team is attacked when they land in the warzone and he’s left alone without a contact inside to pick up the pieces.
The macho, bar-stool voice bravado that seems to pervade most male comic book characters personalities isn’t skimped on in this series. The most interesting thing about DMZ is the story that lies beneath the surface, the story the news is often unable to provide about warzones: the story of what life is like for the individual. If post-apocalyptic genre stories should be judged not on the questions of why the word as we know it has come to an end, but what life is like for people after the fact and how communities attempt to rebuild themselves, then DMZ is worth a read in this regard.
I got sent two excellent collections of writing in the mail last week.
The above is Fragmentation + Other Stories, put together by my Orlando homies Jana Waring and Ryan Rivas under their new imprint Burrow Press. I haven’t read the whole thing yet, just blasted through a few that caught my eye, most notably the flash piece at the book takes its name from by Peg Alford Pursell. She knows the key to a good flash piece is to illustrate those emotions we have that spark up real quick and fade just as fast. Tom Debauchamp’s story about a kid that compulsively says the word “skullfucker” before everything had me thinking it was going to be shocking for the sake of being shocking, but then turned out to pull off a real heart warmer. Full disclosure: I have a piece in here. While I would be psyched if you read it (it’s pretty good), that’s not why I’m pumping this collection up. Jana and Ryan are taking the initiative to start a small press for Orlando and the surrounding area, the place where I’m from and a place that doesn’t have that sort of thing. They’re taking a step towards creating an outlet for writers in that area, something that I didn’t have when I was there, and all that makes me feel good. Buy this one, it’s good writing from good people.
Issue Five contributor William Walsh was good enough to send me a copy of this collection he put together with Ampersand Books called RE: Telling – An Anthology of Borrowed Premises, Stolen Settings, Purloined Plots and Appropriated Characters. Issue Six contributor Matt Bell lends his magic to the immortal Mario Bros. in Mario’s Three Lives. Another contributor from the same issue, Jim Ruland, takes the Jack and Jill nursery rhyme to the seedy underbelly of Amsterdam and the morally ambiguous terrain of adulthood. This collection is all about fun, a chance to watch some of your favorite writers (Blake Butler, Roxane Gay, Tim Jones-Yelvington, Shya Scanlon, Molly Gaudry, Michael Kimball, Lily Hoang and more) take some pop culture figures and tropes and have a good time flipping them on their head or pushing them to limits you’d never imagined they could approach. Pick this one up if you enjoy reading.
Peace out, New York. We took the Bolt Bus. I will gladly shill for the Bolt Bus if they want to advertise with us. $25 or less and you get a comfortable, swift ride from NY to DC. Free Wifi, free electronic outlets, free beautiful scenery. There were other AWP’ers on this particular Bolt Bus. They will back me up on this.
DC’s public trans is ominous and monolithic. The escalators are poorly oiled and they groan like wounded animals. Inspiring and unsettling at the same time.
Here is the floor of the book fair. We were next to Salt Hill which was real cool fortune. The floor is very quiet on Thursday. Sometimes you get the feeling that there is more people sitting at tables than there is people walking around and visiting the tables…
Here is Matt Siegle. He is nine feet tall and must adjust the microphone to accommodate this fact. We threw a reading with PANK and Mud Luscious and called it Divination in DC. About 50 writers descended on an Irish pub with about four families trying to have a nice dinner on a Thursday night. They were unprepared for what was about to happen to them.
Steve Himmer riffs on the Chuck Norris jokes that were oh-so-popular at the end of the aughts and ramps up the pathos on them.
Mathias Svalina read a poem about the end of the world and its relation to the television show Cheers.
Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz smoked everyone with this poem about a drunk boyfriend at a poetry reading. The first second got cut off. The piece starts with the words “The drunk boyfriend at the bar, he groans…” I really love this one a lot.
And then she read some transcripts from porno movies. She is my new favorite poet. Thanks Cristin.
{image via}
Only the most proficient of techies among us would be able to fix their mobile phone if it broke, or their computer screen if it blinked out. If your car was built in the last fifteen years then you wouldn’t be able to fix the steering system by looking it up at your local library. The age of the professional is over and has given way to the age of the specialist. And every day we sacrifice knowledge of how things work in exchange for comfort of living. In the future, our ability to survive will hinge upon our ability to provide for ourselves, to build our own homes, to craft our own tools, to grow our own food, to reclaim our abandoned sense of imagination and creativity, instead of relying on companies and institutions to provide them for us.
With this in mind, Annalemma is dedicating an entire issue to making things. Annalemma Issue Eight: Creation will celebrate humankind’s capacity to think its way out of problems and conflict. It will focus on people who have been relying on their own ingenuity for some time and people who are trying to rediscover what it means to be a creator.
We’re looking for mostly nonfiction for this issue. Go interview an artisan. Write an essay about how your newfound granola lifestyle has clashed with your loved ones. Profile a medicine man living in a 10×10 shack in North Carolina.
There will be a two to three spaces open for fiction, so the competition will be very stiff. If you’re looking to get published in the print issue the odds are in your favor if you submit nonfiction.
Deadline is March 8th. No pieces over 5000 words will be accepted without first submitting a query letter. No unsolicited poetry will be accepted for this issue. Click here to submit.
{image via}
Just got back from AWP last night and feel like the above image. Many books bought, traded for, given unsolicited and accepted under pressure. Left the camera in the cupboard of the friends apartment we stayed at, so wait for a full report next week. For now, time to get to work!
Crack your fingers. The theme for Annalemma Issue Eight is going to be announced tomorrow.
Also, the computer died for the final time. It is in the process of being banished from the kingdom forever and steps have been taken so that this never happens again. If you’ve sent art submissions in the past month and a half then I probably lost those emails. Please send them again. All the prose submitters need not worry, we keep that stuff on the cloud.
Feel like reading the slush pile? We’re going to be inundated with submissions soon and we’re behind as it is, so contact me at chris {at} annalemma {dot} net if you want to get your hands filthy on some raw words. We could use your help and it could help you learn a bit about what your peers are churning out these days. You will be paid in eternal gratitude and a free copy of the new issue when it comes out.
If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your …
“What if you are part of the problem? What do you do when you realize that your history is …
Rumpus: Is this interview being monitored right now? Potter: Maybe. The more important question: Is that going to stop …
“(C)ourage is vital piece of any well-lived life.” – Sugar on body image at The Rumpus.…
Copyright Annalemma 2009
