Last week I went to probably the best reading I’ve ever seen. Ladies and gentlemen, the graduation reading of Page 15’s Young Writer’s Camp 2010. In the reader’s chair here is Izabelle. She had a whip-smart piece about a couple of students competing for a marine biology scholarship. She dropped some serious wildlife science on a crowd.

This here’s Vincent. He wrote a story hot on the heels of the the biggest sporting event of the decade. It was about a fútbol player named Xavier who worked his way up from the bottom to win the World Cup. A dude literally gets kicked in the face in his story. Sports are rough.

Melik here unfolded an epic super hero tale about a dog named Dookie and his quest to defeat the evil Black I Peas. Have you ever written a story with sentient onions with the teeth of alligators? Yeah, I didn’t think so. Melik beat you to it.

The writing was phenominal, but here’s where most readings pale in comparison to this one: Pizza was served afterward. I’ll bet people would be a lot more interested in readings if ‘roni ‘za were involved.

Keep an eye out for these writers. Their imaginations are going to be making waves very soon. Thanks to Julia Young, Ryan Rivas, Jana Waring and all the volunteers for letting Annalemma be a part of Page 15’s 2010 Young Writers Camp.

And thanks for the card!

It’s impossible to talk about this book without talking about how it was made so we’ll get that out of the way first. Kaelan has embraced the idea of the book-as-object, adding another layer of immersion for the reader.

Interior pages of the book are 100% recycled paper, but the cover is the impressive feat of printing: All first editions have been letter pressed on seed paper, a kind of recycled paper containing birch tree seeds that, once planted, have the capability to offset the carbon footprint of the book 10x over. It’s part of the Zero Emission Book Project, Kaelan’s effort to release and support a book without the use of unsustainable energy.

Most products of the green movement are not made to benefit the environment, but to make the consumer feel better about themselves. To alleviate a degree or two of the inherent guilt the consumer feels for being a consumer and not a sustainer. The reading experience is permeated by the objectness of the book: Running your fingers over the spruce seeds embedded in the pulpy cover, the debossed orange silhouette of a naked man swinging a coyote around his head by the tail, serve as a constant reminder of the production means used in the printing of the book.

Strange (and somewhat depressing) that it takes a book of fiction to embrace the idea of a sustainable printing. Meanwhile, mountains of nonfiction reference and instrucitonal books on becoming environmentally conscious employ conventional production means, completely dismissive of the ideals they tout.

This wildly inventive and ambitious project veers close to overshadowing the content of the book. But after reading, it’s clear that the story is only enhanced by the production means. We’re Getting On is the story of Dan, a man who can best be describe as an environmental regressionist. Dan recruits a gang of four strangers, almost on a whim, to follow him out to a tract of land where the plan is to fully remove themselves from the trappings of modern living. But it’s not long until the experiment in sustainable living fails and morphs into an exercise rejecting forward, or even lateral, movement and moves toward the direction of  regression. Dan’s totalitarian control over the group is tenuous. Cracks and divides show themselves until the structural integrity of the collective falls apart completely.

This is a book about the effect of restrictions. The object restrains itself from using simpler, cheaper forms of publishing for the sake of producing a book that has little-to-no carbon footprint. The characters in the story restrain themselves from using any sort of innovation or mode of being that would make them human. Dan strives to become something less than human, something that doesn’t that doesn’t have aspirations to rise above its environment, a struggle to become just another insignificant organism.

The story and the object make a statement in two parts: sustainable living is possible, but it doesn’t have to be what you think it is. It could be seen as an attack on sustainable living, like, taken to its logical conclusion we should all be aimed toward Dan’s goal, tearing ourselves away from progression and devolving back to homo-erectus status. But the statement the object makes is that humans are capable of living sustainably, we’ve done it before, we can do it again. And it’s possible for us to do that without backtracking on the evolutionary ladder. Dan illustrates this in the last chapter as he’s been exiled from his collective and wanders, starving and fragmented, among the harsh elements, “(A) new beginning seems beyond my grasp. I’ve gone too far in the other direction, and this isn’t a circle or a cycle, but a spectrum at the ends of which are two terminal extremes.”

Taken by itself, the story stands alone and is worth the read. But taken with the object, the reading experience becomes something larger: a book that whole-heartedly embraces a polarizing issue in a way that is passionately creative in execution and radically practical in its ideal. It’s more than reading a work of fiction, it’s actively participating in a movement.

Buy it here from Flatmancrooked.

My blood pumped a little faster when I opened up my RSS feed this morning and saw two things that I loved were combined into one great thing: The Rumpus had interviewed  Jesse Hlebo. To be honest, I’d let Jesse fall off my radar a little bit since he sent us some photos for a piece we ran in Issue #4. What a mistake. For the past year, Jesse has been putting a lot of his contemporaries to shame with his never-ending enthusiasm and work ethic. Check out Swill Children, a small press and record label started by Jesse and a few of his friends. Already they’ve released  a fistfull of 7″ records, a zine featuring the photography of David Potes and a lit and arts broadside called _Quarterly. Oh, and he’s only 21.

For your dedication to positivity and community within the arts, for your inspirational work ethic, for your accomplishments in creating beautiful things, Annalemma salutes you, Jesse Hlebo.

Issue Five contributors Danny Jones and Jonpaul Douglass have started a new monthly online publication dedicated to gentlemen and the crafts that they love. Grain & Gram interviews men immersed in, and enthralled by, the process of making things.  The second issue went live yesterday and features letterpress guru Nick Sambrato, of Mama’s Sauce Print Shoppe. My favorite thing about G&G is the scroll-ability of the page. Most websites are obsessively all about the clicks. Danny’s meticulous attention to detail and angular design style paired with Jonpaul’s rich, textured photos eliminate any desire to leave a page, making the G&G reading experience a smooth and engaging one. Cheers to Danny and Jonpaul for, yet again, making something very cool. Looking forward to seeing who they spotlight next.

Sasha Fletcher deals in extremes. In When All Our Days Are Numbered Marching Bands Will Fill the Streets But We Will Not Hear Them Because We Will Be Upstairs in the Clouds, there are only a couple characters and there are a lot of characters. There is very little happening and there is a lot happening. A man (husband? boyfriend?) is telling a woman (wife? girlfriend?) with some kind of affliction (blindness?) and extended story, a fantastic run-on where birds are plucked from within stomachs, whales swallow cruise ships, clouds and waterfalls insinuate themselves into the narrative at random. The only thing that appears to be important to the storyteller is momentum and excitement, almost as if he doesn’t have time to worry about plot and character, almost as if there will be real consequences to face if he doesn’t keep the story moving, if he doesn’t keep his audience interested and invested in what’s happening. Plot lines get abandoned and new ones get created, old ones get picked up again and attempts are made to connect them with the new ones. It’s like spending an afternoon in a backyard with a kid with ADD, but in a good way, like only in the exciting and engaging way that kids with ADD can be.

When is a different kind of love story, one where the love between a man (with a thought process like that of a slinky falling down an endless set of stairs) and his audience is the only thing that isn’t heavily expanded upon. There is no explanation as to why he’s telling her these stories, you’re left to figure that one out on your own. It’s not that Fletcher is refraining from insulting your intelligence by spelling things out for you, it’s that he’s got more interesting things to think about, say, a marching band procession leading a boat-full of people out of a whales mouth and down the street.

It could be a mistake to call this book whimsical. Whimsy has a bad connotation. When a writer tries to be whimsical it can often feel like they’re jerking you around, like they’re trying to have fun and be like a child again, which can be annoying because the writer is clearly old enough to have kids of their own and they should just grow the fuck up already. When does not contain this type of whimsy.

It’s a whimsy that deals with real emotions, a whimsy that deals sex and death, with love and loneliness, fear and anxiety. Whimsy has a connotation of lightness, of airy frivolity. Fletcher deals with tangible, life-changing things in a style that is, on its face, whimsical. But underneath, it’s a voice that has a deep understanding of what it means to be human, and what it means to be alive and constantly living in the moment, always moving forward.

Buy it from MLP.

A few months back this blog saluted Gabriel Levinson, operator of the Book Bike. Chicago thinks the Book Bike is a threat to the public process and decided to shut him down. I think that is fucking bullshit. Absolute, utter bullshit. In spite of all the dubious and downright nefarious things the city of Chicago daily turns a blind eye to, their swift arm of justice has effectively obstructed one of the primary threats to Chicagoans: free literature. Way to go, Chi (slow clap). Way. To. Go. {via. Hat-tip to Vol. 1}

If the goal of an artist is to sift through the layers of nonsense that permeate the world in order to find some truth, then a writer has to be prepared to look at the dark side of humanity. She has to be comfortable with shining a light on the negativity, the fear, the selfishness, the anxiety, all the crawling exoskeletal things that scatter when examining a person’s soul. They are a large part of what makes us human, and while they make you uncomfortable, to confront them is to overcome them. Mary Miller is unafraid to expose these darker parts.

There’s a quiet hostility to the women in Less Shiny. They desire to softly destroy, to silently devour the things around them. The characters deal with pain, betrayal and heartache but Miller presents it all without a trace of melodrama. The sentences are spare and stark. Her voice is calm, assured, unassuming.

In “April and Benny” a woman wants to sleep with a man but she is engaged to one of his friends so she figures the next best thing is to let him perform a home nose piercing on her. In “Boyfriend” a woman shares the secrets of her marriage with a man she’s having an affair with. In “A Blind Dog and a Colony of Bees” a woman accepts a ride home from a man on drugs and she imagines herself in a dark corner of his basement, pissing herself to stay warm. The image does not bother her.

Besides the writing, one of the interesting things about Less Shiny is how self contained it is. There’s a few blurbs on the back and a bio in the end pages, but for the most part it’s very matter-of-fact: a staple bound collection of 22 pages of short, short fictions. No headshot, no double title page, no back cover summery pontificating on the nature or meaning of the words therein, just the words. Much like the stories themselves, the book, as an object, reflects an aesthetic Miller wields with skill. The book does nothing to suggest the power that it holds beneath the surface. The cover is light and attractive, the artwork warm and inviting, but start to dig deeper and things become more complicated. Go even further and they begin to get dark very quickly.

Buy it here from Magic Helicopter.

(image by Ben Chlapek)

Do you ever ask yourself, “What am I really contributing to the good of mankind with this story I am submitting? Is the whole of the earth better off with this released into the collective consciousness?”

Or does it ever get to that point for you? Most writers of fiction are completely ego maniacal. Unapologetically obsessed with themselves. And not always in a narcissistic way, in a masochistic way too. This doesn’t always make them bad people. Just cause you have a huge ego doesn’t mean you’re a sociopath. And sociopaths are terrible writers.

What’s the point in writing something unless you know it’s going to be a spark of positivity in someone’s life, or at the very least, a spark of empathy? With every story you write, you should be asking yourself, “What is someone (anyone) going to get out of this?” The answer to that question should be the place where you judge your worth as a writer.

Anyone else think different?

(image by Michael Rubenstien)

Julia Whitty‘s dissection of the population crisis, The Last Taboo, at Mother Jones is a fantastic piece of journalism that will most likely change the way that you look at the world. The article is an impressive objective look at the issue of overpopulation that manages to skirt all the negative connotations, from racism to totalitarianism, that the subject tends to dredge up.

Whitty’s assertions: 1) Global birthrate must fall if the planet is to sustain all the people currently on it. 2) The most effective contraception is properly educated women who are prospering financially. 3) The most effective way of accomplishing this is through micro loans.

The poems in Melissa Broder’s collection begin with a spark of desire. The people who inhabit them are unsatisfied with what they have, the spoils of their good fortune carry an unforeseen dark side that they’re incapable of dealing with. Teenage waifs pray to be delivered from Burger King with People Magazine, Anarchists lament the next generation of revolutionaries bickering about the proper way to make dreadlocks in the hair care aisle of Duane Reade, a Wall Street yuppie abandons his designer apartment and Savignon Blanc for a skateboard and the faux spiritualist world of San Francisco.

At times it’s unclear if Broder is calling the upper class on their existentialist problems or if she genuinely feels for them. One moment she’ll pair a junkie-film enthusiast with a real junkie who’s peaking and using the film fan for his own perverse entertainment. Another moment she’ll be at odds with her own vanity, feeling shame over feeling shame over her pimples. Broder culls the suicide, the anorexia, the drugs, the pathologies and manias of the upper class into a spotlight and comes to the brink of indicting them, but not before trying make sense out of why these people feel the way they feel.

It’s interesting to read these poems in the wake of the financial disaster of ’08. They capture a moment in time where the well-to-do could complain about their problems while protected by a bubble of ignorance. It’s hard to believe that in today’s economic climate a Wall Streeter would give up any sort of job to go live an idealized skateboard dream. The fallout of the mortgage crisis robbed America of its privilege take issue with trivial things. In a way this collection is an quiet chronicle of American opulence.

But ultimately these poems are not about the well off dealing with the problems of the well off. They are about people who’ve developed in a frictionless life, one free struggle. Struggle that is important to shaping ones personality, to shaping ones ability to adapt and evolve. As a result, the people in Broder’s poems try on personalities like second hand clothes, hoping something will shape them, define them, stick to the walls of their souls and give their lives some meaning. But in the screaming light of the day it becomes clear that those clothes simply don’t fit. And where to go from there is a complete mystery.

Buy it here from Ampersand Books.