We’ve got a lot of great things coming up, including new projects from The Accomplices, and new titles from all 3 of our lines: CCM, #RECURRENT, & Writ Large Press. Get excited.

September 2018

• Learning by Andrew Choate (Writ Large Press)
• Sad Laughter by Brian Alan Ellis (CCM)
• Tom Sawyer by Joseph Grantham (CCM)

October 2018

• i don’t write about race by June Gehringer (CCM)
• Coldwater Canyon by Anne-Marie Kinney (CCM)
• The Fat Kid by Jamie Iredell (CCM)

February 2019

• Losing Miami by Gabriel Ojeda-Sague (#RECURRENT)
• Experiments in Joy by Gabrielle Civil (#RECURRENT)
• (the other house) by Rocío Carlos (#RECURRENT)
• Psychopomps by Alex DiFrancesco (CCM)
• Ghosts are Just Strangers That Know How to Knock by Hillary Leftwich (CCM)
• Letters to My City by Mike Sonksen (Writ Large Press)
• Navigating With(out) Instruments by Traci Kato-Kiriyama (Writ Large Press)

October 2019

• American Symphony: Other White Lies by Suiyi Tang (#RECURRENT)
• Between Appear and Disappear by Doug Rice (#RECURRENT)
• Mama Wata by Omotara James (Siren Songs)
• The Depression by Mathias Svalina; photography by Jon Pack (CCM)

February 2020

• Myth of the Garbage Patch by Maya Weeks (#RECURRENT)
• Emotion(al) Anthropology: The Secret Lives of Negroes (Show Tunes for a Show That Hasn’t Been Written Yet) A Post-American Project by Ernest Hardy (Writ Large Press)

 

Get a-meow-zing deals this week(end) on select bestselling titles & new/forthcoming books from The Accomplices. Not only are these great deals, but you can get snag some of our forthcoming titles before they are officially released. Whoa. This sale will end Tuesday, September 4 (at 11:59PM EST).

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Choose from the following titles:

? TOM SAWYER by Joseph Grantham (CCM, Forthcoming Sept, 10 2018) – TOM
? LEARNING by Andrew Choate (WLP, Forthcoming Sept, 10 2018) – CHOATE
? I DON’T WRITE ABOUT RACE by June Gehringer (CCM, Forthcoming Oct, 4 2018) – RACE
? COLDWATER CANYON by Anne-Marie Kinney (CCM, Forthcoming Oct, 4 2018) – KINNEY
? SAD LAUGHTER by Brian Alan Ellis (CCM, Forthcoming Oct, 4 2018) – SAD
? THE FAT KID by Jamie Iredell (CCM, Forthcoming Oct, 4 2018) – FAT
? HOLLYWOOD NOTEBOOK by Wendy C. Ortiz (WLP) – HOLLYWOOD
? BRUJA by Wendy C. Ortiz (CCM) – BRUJA
? ICON by F. Douglas Brown (WLP) – ICON
? TO AFAR FROM AFAR by Soham Patel (WLP) – AFAR
? ABDUCTIONS by Chiwan Choi (WLP) – ABDUC
? THE YELLOW HOUSE by Chiwan Choi (CCM) – YELLOW
? HOW TO KEEP YOU ALIVE by Ella Longpre (CCM) – LONGPRE
? SWALLOW THE FISH by Gabrielle Civil (CCM) – CIVIL
? THE SKY ISN’T BLUE by Janice Lee (CCM) – LEE
? THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza (CCM) – FLOWERS

When ordering, please remember to include your selected titles in the boxes.

(Note: It seems that on some mobile payment systems, it’s skipping the Special Instructions box. If so, just shoot us an email here with your selections. Thanks!)

All prices include shipping. This offer is only available in the United States.

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2 for $25

SALE HAS EXPIRED.

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4 for $40

SALE HAS EXPIRED.

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All titles will ship after Thursday, September 6 and will arrive in approx. 2-4 weeks.

Email us with any questions or concerns.

What’s your favorite song to dance to?

Wynonie Harris – Quiet Whiskey

Describe your personal hell.

Populated by undecided voters only; ketchup is the only condiment; only thing to drink is milk; all heat, no shade; lots of paper and no pens; only sound is piped-in conversation from exhibition openings across the world

What’s something that always makes you laugh?

Being tickled on my side; memories of good people and the funny decisions they made

You’re sucked into a bad movie and you have to choose a point in history to live out the rest of your years. What time do you choose and why?

I’m no Stephen King, but the idealist in me would like to go back and change the history of one of the world’s most violent and disastrous series of events – the problem is that there are too many to choose from, and most of the egregious singular events are simply moments within bigger patterns of rewarding the exploitation and oppression of other people. Picking one, how about going back to the 13th Century and attempting to reverse the outcome of the Crusades. Maybe that would have made things better? I don’t know, but it’s hard to think things could have gone worse. Preventing Reagan and Thatcher from being born sounds delightful as well. The hell of corporate oppression that the entire world is suffering from seems to stem from a lot of their happiness to enjoin corporate interests with government collusion.

But for a personally indulgent answer, I’d go back to 1952 purely for the possibility of living through the next decade+ of live jazz. What happened between 1952-1968 is just wild. But I would do anything to hear Ellington, Parker, Dolphy, Mingus, Desmond, Coltrane, etc.

What’s a gif that you can relate to?

I’m not a gif guy but I just googled “relative gifs” and the first thing I saw was the Simpsons sitting on a couch and it reminded me of Homer lifting his fifth beer and leaving a stain of beer-can rings in the shape of the Olympics symbol. That’s my kind of imagination.

You’re hit by lightning. What happens?

I have a poem about a field of “lightninged ice” – a place where lightning strikes into an ice field and each strike pulls its exact shape back up out of the ice and it remains frozen, a forest of reverse-lightninged ice. I imagine something similar internally: I would keep the lightning inside me and occasionally cough little static charges.

It’s snowing outside, how do you feel?

Fantastic. When the weather is bad and you don’t have demands, you are free to do as you please: play in it, watch it, feel snuggled by the fact that you aren’t in it. Possibilities are so wonderfully deep. (Plus I grew up in South Carolina and only got the chance to play in the snow once for real as a kid. Luckily I was about 12 I think so I could really enjoy it.

I don’t feel this way by the sun: heat makes a lot of the things I want to do outside impossible. And yet it somehow diminishes the pleasantness of being inside as well.

What’s a cat picture you can get behind?

I can’t answer this without thinking of a novel my friend Dwight is writing, one of the theses of which is that the internet exists only to spread images of cats because: the more cats, the more toxoplasmosis, endlessly. The book is outrageous because it is so real and so thoroughly researched and so superficially outrageous. Whenever I see an image of a cat on a shirt in a store window, I can only think of his book and the thesis that he elaborately justifies, and which is just one of the many theses regarding contemporary consciousness and culture in the book.

Where did you write most of your book? Why?

All of it in my office. I needed to have papers everywhere because I had a lot of documents to sort through – medical reports, legal stuff, my files I was keeping during the time the book narrates, etc. Plus I could sleep there (don’t tell the landlord!) and get up and go right back to it. I’ve got a small fridge, an electric kettle, and a loveseat in there – plus all my books – so it’s a very cozy place for me.

What are your struggles and strengths as a writer?

My strength is that I’m good at recognizing how to communicate in a way that others will understand and be entertained by; my struggle is that what I want to communicate isn’t often what people are interested in thinking about. I like wildness – wild imagery, wild uses of sounds, wild ideas. And what’s wild to me is sometimes extra-wild to a civilian.

Tell us a little about your writing process. What works, what doesn’t, what doesn’t but you still try anyway?

I write down little thoughts and reactions all the time – I fill dozens of notebooks every year. I have a writing pad next to my bed, another one next to the one chair in my apartment, another in my car, and a notebook in my bag at all times. I fill a page and I tear it off and type it up (or research whatever I jotted down to learn more about.) Because I have multiple things I’m working on at all times, each little note goes into its place: fodder for my Horizon Poems series; descriptions of “projects;” bollard stuff of course; new poems/ raw lines; songs; rants; additions to working poems; etc.

The real work comes when I get invited to do a reading. I will start looking at all the current poems I’ve been working on. I’ll open em all up as well as my file of raw lines and see what I like from the raw stuff that I can coax and coagulate into relevance to the issues being investigated in whatever current poem I’m trying to finish. Usually, I’ll have to read a poem in front of an audience before I figure out how to complete it. A lot of poems that I’ve been reading for a decade or more only exist on paper because of all the notes of how I’ve changed it over the years.

That account describes my general everyday writing. But it’s different once I focus in on bigger, more specific projects. For example, I just completed writing a poem for every episode of Gilmore Girls. I developed a strategy looking at each episode and taking notes of certain features of each episode, and then formulated each poem based on the text I collected. But every big project requires a different set of habits. I’m currently working on a graphic novel using only images from all the airline safety cards I’ve stolen over the last 20+ years in combination with images from exercise LP instruction booklets (while each set of instructions is quite similar from plane to plane and from exercise routine to exercise routine, the way the actions are depicted varies extraordinarily.) I need to scan all these things and then I will start talking about my mom and how her favorite fruit used to be strawberries, and how I value insight and imagination over storytelling and then move on from there…

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ANDREW CHOATE is a writer who was born and raised in South Carolina. He is the author of Langquage Makes Plastic of the Body (Palm Press), Stingray Clapping (Insert Blanc Press), and Too Many Times I See Every Thing Just the Way It Is (Poetics Research Bureau.)  I Love You More, a collection of his texts for performance, is forthcoming from Insert Blanc. His writings on music and art have been published in The Wire, Signal to Noise, The Attic, Coda, Art Ltd., d’Art International, and Facsimile.

As @saintbollard he photographs and organizes performances around bollards. He won the award for Best Visual/ Performance Art, as well as the Warwick Broadhead Memorial Award at the 2016 Dunedin Fringe Festival in New Zealand. His visual work has been exhibited at the Yerevan Center for Contemporary Art, the Torrance Art Museum, Barnsdall Art Park, The University of Western Australia, Mullany High, the Giradeau Chapel, High Energy Constructs, Overca$h Gallery and, most recently, General Projects, where he had his first solo show, Demon Purse, in 2018. Corroballorations, a duo show with Joe Williamson at PS Kaufman in 2018, elicited sparks of approval.

#CopingWith is CCM’s interview series run by managing editor Joanna C. Valente

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Lynn Melnick is a contributor in our anthology “A Shadow Map,” which is due for release on February 22, 2017 (although it did be launch at AWP this year in DC). Lynn is also the author of the book “If I Should Say I Have Hope” published by YesYes Books in 2012. Of the book, the Matthea Harvey has said, “On the melancholy-go-round of these poems, there’s a swan-seat for sadness but also a tiger called Beauty and a horse called Hope.” Lynn’s second book is due out from YesYes Books, “Landscape with Sex and Violence” (forthcoming October 2017).

Describe your favorite meal.

My favorite meal is an Eastern European Jewish dish made with egg noodles, cottage cheese, and sour cream. (Sadly, I can’t eat dairy anymore so I can no longer eat my favorite meal!)

 

 

 

FALL 2019:

American Symphony: Other White Lies
by Suiyi Tang

EXPERIMENTAL FICTION / HYBRID / NONFICTION / SPECULATIVE MEMOIR / ASIAN-AMERICAN

American Symphony is a portrait of a portrait, a mirror’s reflection of someone that’s gone missing, a speculative memoir that takes cues and challenges from works by Kathy Acker, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Jenny Zhang. S has made it her duty to be the editor, piecing together how ! had disappeared, picking apart the words that ! had left behind in hopes of discovering what went wrong. Through a captivating assemblage of literary pieces, S solves the puzzle, inadvertently creating an impression of what people remember most of the missing and the dead. Melancholic and bravely honest, Suiyi Tang has achieved something thought to be impossible, taking linguistic fortitude and bending it into a new shape, achieving new emotional heights.

Where in the American literary landscape has there been a place for a text like Suiyi Tang’s American Symphony: Other White Lies? Here is the work of an Asian American female millennial—fiercely intellectual; embodied; by turns, exuberant and melancholic, artistic and theoretical, personal and political—that deserves to be read and heard amid and beyond the usual cacophony of praise for young white writerly yearnings.

In a voice that is wry, shattered, and undeniable, American Symphony takes a torch to the myths of the “model minority,” the available female “Oriental” sex object, and the technically-brilliant-but-not-creative “Asian” while also ripping through the raced and gendered lies undergirding our ideas of nation and aesthetics. A brilliant debut. –Dorothy Wang, author of Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry

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Between Appear and Disappear
by Doug Rice

MEMOIR / AUTOBIOGRAPHY / HYBRID / EXPERIMENTAL

Some memories are transformed into myths at the very moment that they are remembered. Stories are told for those who have vanished, for the loves that have been lost. Language is borne out of this absence.

In spare yet luminous prose, Between Appear and Disappear is a lyrical love story of Mai and Doug, and of the way that memoir is turned into myth.

Between Appear and Disappear is a secular prayer, a body prayer, between seeing and saying, between experience and representation. It
is the only book that I have ever read in my life that is truly corporeal, which is to say truly embodied by and through desire in language. I will hold it close to my heart for the rest of my life. Kind of I wanted to eat it. Definitely I slept with it under my pillow. It is an unforgettable and perfect book at a time when we need books to be exactly what they are, gloriously, unapologetically, mercifully, real.

–Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan and The Chronology of Water

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Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock
by Hillary Leftwich

HYBRID / FICTION / EXPERIMENTAL FICTION / CREATIVE NONFICTION / MEMOIR

Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock is a multi-genre collection that examines grief, violence, heartbreak, and the universal challenge of living in a body that is always vulnerable. In this greyscale kaleidoscope of the familiar and the uncanny, muted voices shout, people commit to devastating choices, and mundane moments are filled with silent hauntings. A sleep paralysis and a séance of voices long dead, this collection’s characters illuminate both our own darkness and our strength, revealing how love can emerge from the most impossible of conditions.

In this hybrid collection of works, Hillary Leftwich speaks to us in her own deeply authentic, inimitable voice. Innovative in approach and breathtaking in execution, Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock is a haunted and haunting work of art. By turns gut-wrenching, dark, funny, and ultimately transcendent, this is a must-read book by a writer of considerable depth and originality.
–Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works from 2003-2018

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COMING 2020:

– Navigating With(out) Instruments by Traci Kato-Kiriyama
– be/trouble by Bridgette Bianca
– Myth of the Garbage Patch by Maya Weeks
– The Depression by Mathias Svalina and Jon Pack
– The Secret Lives of Negroes by Ernest Hardy

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2019 Membership

Want all of the 2019 titles for one low price? For serious cats only. Get all of our 2019 releases (that’s 10 books!) for one low price of $100. Meowza!

Buy Now
$100
Includes shipping / For readers in the United States only

Didn’t go to #AWP18? Or just want to get in on a great deal on new titles from Writ Large Press & Civil Coping Mechanisms? Take advantage of our sale. Select new titles on sale, this month only.

SHOP THE SALE

 

1.      What’s your favorite song to dance to?
“This Must be the Place” by Talking Heads, though I sound like the perfect stereotype of someone in their twenties.

2.      Describe your personal hell.
An UberPool where the other passengers are wearing perfume.

3.      What’s something that always makes you laugh?
Susan Sontag shady frustrated interview/Camille Paglia’s maniacal response. If you haven’t watched, brace yourself for a life-changing video:

4.      You’re sucked into a bad movie and you have to choose a point in history to live out the rest of your years. What time do you choose and why?
Some time in Ancient Egypt. I don’t know, but if you have a society that lasts like 3,000 years, you must be doing SOMETHING right.
5.      What’s a gif that you can relate to?

6.      You’re hit by lightning. What happens?
Widespread tissue damage, cardiac arrhythmia, and loss of consciousness.

7.      It’s snowing outside, how do you feel?
Calm, a bit trapped, but in a good mood to read.

8.      What’s a cat picture you can get behind?
Any picture of my cats Beef and Panini. Here’s one:

9.      Where did you write most of your book? Why?
I wrote most of Losing Miami in my partially windowless apartment in Philadelphia, far away from Miami. Every so often, when I was home for vacation, I’d go to the beach to take notes. The beach, as it were, is the scene of the moving coastline and the potential sinking, even as it is the emblem of Miami’s potential for *fun*.

10.   What are your struggles and strengths as a writer?
I think I’m good at conceiving of a project’s ability to scale up or down, which means conceiving of a book’s contours comes easily to me. I think I’m a better book writer than I am a poem writer. I struggle a bit with making the individual parts of a book-machine (aka the poems) splendidly functional. Instead, I make them fragmented and unapproachable, so that one has to look across poems to find magic and meaning. A struggle and a strength!

11.   Tell us a little about your writing process. What works, what doesn’t, what doesn’t but you still try anyway?
I write late at night, usually in spurts. It’s a very undecorated scene of writing. I wish I woke up with the sun to write in longhand or some bullshit, but I really don’t. I open Microsoft Word after my partner has gone to bed and I try to spit something out. Eventually, something clicks and a book comes out. Hoorah!

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GABRIEL OJEDA-SAGUÉ is a gay, Latino Leo raised in Miami, currently living in Chicago. He is the author of the poetry books Jazzercise is a Language ( The Operating System, 2018), on the exercise craze of the 1980s, and Oil and Candle(Timeless, Infinite Light, 2016), on ritual and racism. He is also the author of chapbooks on gay sex, Cher, the Legend of Zelda, and anxious bilingualism. He is currently a PhD candidate in English at the University of Chicago.

1.   What’s your favorite song to dance to?
Whitney Houston – I Wanna Dance With Somebody. I’m not gonna try to write about Whitney at length here because I’ll start crying, but suffice it to say that we were lucky to have her on Earth for as long as we did.

2.   Describe your personal hell.
That feeling when someone you’re dating texts you “Hey, can we talk later?”, and you’re left waiting for like three hours. Except it’s not three hours, it’s eternity, and the little iMessage ellipses keep telling you that the other person is typing but they never send you anything and you just have to wait to find out what you did. Forever.

3.   What’s something that always makes you laugh?
My friend Lily is the funniest person on Earth. Like, if I had to pick one person to be stuck on a desert island with, I’d pick her. She’s proof that earth signs do in fact have personalities. I’d link to her twitter but she keeps getting doxxed by neo-nazis. Suffice it to say that her tweets are very outrageous and very good

4.   You’re sucked into a bad movie and you have to choose a point in history to live out the rest of your years. What time do you choose and why?
Oh gosh. I don’t know. There aren’t a lot of historical moments I can imagine in which I’d wanna be trans. Am I allowed to choose the present? If so, I’d pick that. Everyone I love lives here.

5.   What’s a gif that you can relate to?
This gif of Lucy Liu in Kill Bill is everything to me.

6.   You’re hit by lightning. What happens?
Ok, one of two things happen. Either I die or I don’t. If I die, there’s a funeral and it’s like this big tragic thing and a whole big mess and it fucks up everyone I love forever, to such a degree & in such a way that it’s hard for me to think about it, even in a completely hypothetical context. That or I… just get up and keep walking, and probably, like, try to go do whatever else I have to do that day.

7.   It’s snowing outside, how do you feel?
Like, cathartic melancholy. Thinking how it’s sad & pretty like a SZA song. At some point in the back of my brain there are practical voices telling me that snow is a major nuisance, especially here in Philly, but mostly I feel gratified. Sad & peaceful & consoled.

8.   What’s a cat picture you can get behind?
This picture of my partner’s cat, Scrambles, makes me scream w/ laughter. Like, Scrambles is visibly a Pisces, lol.

9.   Where did you write most of your book? Why?
I wrote the first half of the book in various places in New Orleans, mostly in the bathroom at a restaurant I worked at. The second half was written on my phone, mostly while out drinking at Pageturners Lounge in Omaha, NE. I wrote at work because that was when I had time to write, and I wrote at the bar because I spent most of 2017-2018 in like a pretty unhealthy alcoholic haze. I’m glad to be healthy & (just over 9 months!!!) sober these days, & I can’t wait to soberly author my next book from the comfort of my bed.

10.   What are your struggles and strengths as a writer?
The pressure to publish has lead me to rush a lot of work out when I maybe didn’t need to. I love this book, but it’s not the book that I set out to write. It’s hard for me not to think about how good this book could have been if I had given myself another year or two to work on it. That said, I tend to produce a lot of work, to the point where it was relatively easy for me two put out two full-lengths almost exactly a year apart. I’m pretty much always churning stuff out. With my next book, I want to take the time I feel I deserve to produce something I’m really proud of. Like, if I really wanted to, I have enough work right now that I could feasibly assemble a publishable manuscript and start sending it out, but it wouldn’t be the book that I want to see in the world. I’m trying to coax myself into a little patience, and to be more loving with myself. I guess that’s my biggest struggle (and isn’t it everyone’s?)—loving myself and loving my work.

11.   Tell us a little about your writing process. What works, what doesn’t, what doesn’t but you still try anyway?
Sometimes I get this idea in my head that if I just go about my life and try to like be a conscious, decent person, that I’ll just naturally have these ~deep insights~ into life and I can just write them down in my phone notes as I go, casually casting off gems as I wander the world. It’s like the stupidest idea ever. That’s just not how making stuff works. A poem is a crafted object, like a kitchen table or a violin or macaroni art. If you practice often and attentively, you can get really good at making anything through thoughtful repetition. When I make time to read & study & actually sit down with ideas and force myself to work on something for a long time, that’s when my best work comes out. From the outside, all art seems esoteric & mystical, & on the inside it couldn’t be more unromantic. All it takes is repetition & a genuine desire to improve.

 

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Born and raised in Omaha, NE, JUNE GEHRINGER is a mixed Chinese trans woman who is somehow still alive. She is the author of I love you it looks like rain (Be About It 2017), and EVERYONE IS A BIG BUG TO SOMEONE (self-published) 2017. She is the co-founder of tenderness yea, and tweets @unlovablehottie. She holds a B.A. in English from Loyola University New Orleans and has worked as a cook since she was 16.

1. What’s your favorite song to dance to?
I have many favorite songs to dance to. Most of them are from the 1970s. Especially funk & soul songs. “Running Away,” from Roy Ayers is one of the first that comes to mind. It is a joyful song that never fails to electrify a room. Ayers is best known for “Everybody Loves the Sunshine.” He is the intersection of funk, soul & jazz. “Running Away,” was a huge hit in the disco era, but he was making dance music before they ever coined disco as a name for a genre of dance music.

A Tribe Called Quest among many others sampled “Running Away.” Another favorite is “September,” by Earth Wind & Fire. There’s also “Boogie Nights,” by Heat Wave. The grooves from that era are so undeniable that they even get me moving no matter what kind of mood I am in. A hip hop song that gets me grooving is “Paid in Full,” by Eric B & Rakim.

2. Describe your personal hell.  
My personal hell is having too many books and not enough time to read them all. It’s a first world problem, but there is never enough time to get caught up. Actually having too many books is not a personal hell, but I wish there was more time to enjoy them all.

3. What’s something that always makes you laugh? 
I always laugh at the sarcasm of my wife and daughter. They both have a cutting wit that can stop you dead in your tracks. I have learned to just laugh about it because they are both so good at it and they are constantly calling me out. Another thing that makes me laugh is the curiosity of my five-year-old son. He just asked me the other day, “Dad, what’s the Illuminati?” he was smiling as he said it. Somehow he saw it on YouTube. He spends a fair amount of time on the iPad and he really gets around somehow. All I could do was laugh.
Another time I got on the iPad right after him, and he had a $300 Lego spaceship in our Amazon Shopping cart. He hadn’t clicked it all the way through to finalize the sale and I was able to intercept it before he did, but the fact that he had got that far with almost purchasing it cracked me up. He’s a clever dude and never fails to make me laugh.

4. You’re sucked into a bad movie and you have to choose a point in history to live out the rest of your years. What time do you choose and why?   
I choose the early 1970s because this was the beginning of America awakening to broader consciousness. I like 2019 even better, but the early 1970s was a period where the seeds of our current moment began to disseminate.

5. What’s a gif that you can relate to?
My daughter is always showing me a million of these. Most of the ones she shows are hilarious. Regarding my book though, here’s one that I like a lot because it shows the city’s transformation.

 

6. You’re hit by lightning. What happens?
I get magnetized and become one with the electromagnetic spectrum. At that point I vaporize and become a part of the sky.

7. It’s snowing outside, how do you feel?
I love the snow. It makes me wanna either cuddle up with a good book and read for hours on end or eat a warm bowl of corn chowder soup. I don’t like driving in the snow because I was once a passenger in a van that crashed on black ice near the Grand Canyon in Northern Arizona.  The van ended up sliding across the ice, into a meadow and then taking out four Ponderosa pine trees. Fortunately no one was injured, but it was a wild ride and one of the scariest moments of my life. That being said, If I am not driving and already warm and safe somewhere, I love the snow.

8.What’s a cat picture you can get behind?
Our cat Aiko is photogenic and my wife’s assistant. She is adorable and always steals any picture she is in. My wife and daughter sometimes feed the local stray cats and there are now about 4 or 5 cats from around our block that can be frequently found in our backyard. My daughter has drawn a few of them and my wife painted a portrait of Aiko.

9. Where did you write most of your book? Why?
I wrote some of my book in our upstairs attic while my wife and kids were asleep. I also wrote a lot of it at various coffeehouses with my good friend F. Douglas Brown writing his. We are both teachers and dads with extra busy lives and those few hours we can meet up at a coffee spot to write are gold.

10. What are your struggles and strengths as a writer?
The struggle of course is about finding enough time. I love to read and research. I could read for years and years. Sometimes you get to a point where you want to research more but the deadline looms and you have to go for what you know. A strength I have is retaining information and I have the ability to learn a lot about a topic very quickly. The struggle is to condense it all down and get it into an accessible form.

11. Tell us a little about your writing process. What works, what doesn’t, what doesn’t but you still try anyway?
I write at least 5 haiku everyday. I also try to read for 15-20 minutes before I write just to get the juices flowing. I now have to write in chunks because of my family and teaching schedule. I used to write several days a week at night from about 10 PM to 2 or 3 AM, but now I write in the afternoons, in between classes, while my kids are at various lessons and any other time I can squeeze in.

What always works for me is reading up on a topic and really doing my research before i write about something. I also like to get out in the city and spend time in reconnaissance studying a neighborhood, community space or whatever I am writing about. The field work is huge and the more of it I do, the better the piece usually is.

 

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Equally a scholar and performer, Mike Sonksen, also …known as, Mike the Poet, is a 3rd-generation L.A. native acclaimed for poetry performances, published articles and mentoring teen writers. Following his graduation from U.C.L.A. in 1997, he has published over 500 essays and poems. Mike has an Interdisciplinary Master of Arts in English and History and his prose and poetry have been included in programs with the Mayor’s Office, the Los Angeles Public Library’s “Made in LA,” series, Grand Park, the Music Center and the Friends of the Los Angeles River. Mike has taught at Cal State L.A., Southwest College and Woodbury University. In June of 2018 one of his KCET essays was awarded by the LA Press Club.

TODAY IS RELEASE DAY FOR THESE AMEOWZING TITLES. Order them now!

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American Symphony: Other White Lies
by Suiyi Tang

BUY NOW FROM AMAZON / BN / INDIEBOUND

EXPERIMENTAL FICTION / HYBRID / NONFICTION / SPECULATIVE MEMOIR / ASIAN-AMERICAN

American Symphony is a portrait of a portrait, a mirror’s reflection of someone that’s gone missing, a speculative memoir that takes cues and challenges from works by Kathy Acker, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Jenny Zhang. S has made it her duty to be the editor, piecing together how ! had disappeared, picking apart the words that ! had left behind in hopes of discovering what went wrong. Through a captivating assemblage of literary pieces, S solves the puzzle, inadvertently creating an impression of what people remember most of the missing and the dead. Melancholic and bravely honest, Suiyi Tang has achieved something thought to be impossible, taking linguistic fortitude and bending it into a new shape, achieving new emotional heights.

Where in the American literary landscape has there been a place for a text like Suiyi Tang’s American Symphony: Other White Lies? Here is the work of an Asian American female millennial—fiercely intellectual; embodied; by turns, exuberant and melancholic, artistic and theoretical, personal and political—that deserves to be read and heard amid and beyond the usual cacophony of praise for young white writerly yearnings.

In a voice that is wry, shattered, and undeniable, American Symphony takes a torch to the myths of the “model minority,” the available female “Oriental” sex object, and the technically-brilliant-but-not-creative “Asian” while also ripping through the raced and gendered lies undergirding our ideas of nation and aesthetics. A brilliant debut. –Dorothy Wang, author of Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry

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Between Appear and Disappear
by Doug Rice

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MEMOIR / AUTOBIOGRAPHY / HYBRID / EXPERIMENTAL

Some memories are transformed into myths at the very moment that they are remembered. Stories are told for those who have vanished, for the loves that have been lost. Language is borne out of this absence.

In spare yet luminous prose, Between Appear and Disappear is a lyrical love story of Mai and Doug, and of the way that memoir is turned into myth.

Between Appear and Disappear is a secular prayer, a body prayer, between seeing and saying, between experience and representation. It
is the only book that I have ever read in my life that is truly corporeal, which is to say truly embodied by and through desire in language. I will hold it close to my heart for the rest of my life. Kind of I wanted to eat it. Definitely I slept with it under my pillow. It is an unforgettable and perfect book at a time when we need books to be exactly what they are, gloriously, unapologetically, mercifully, real.

–Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan and The Chronology of Water

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Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock
by Hillary Leftwich

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HYBRID / FICTION / EXPERIMENTAL FICTION / CREATIVE NONFICTION / MEMOIR

Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock is a multi-genre collection that examines grief, violence, heartbreak, and the universal challenge of living in a body that is always vulnerable. In this greyscale kaleidoscope of the familiar and the uncanny, muted voices shout, people commit to devastating choices, and mundane moments are filled with silent hauntings. A sleep paralysis and a séance of voices long dead, this collection’s characters illuminate both our own darkness and our strength, revealing how love can emerge from the most impossible of conditions.

In this hybrid collection of works, Hillary Leftwich speaks to us in her own deeply authentic, inimitable voice. Innovative in approach and breathtaking in execution, Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock is a haunted and haunting work of art. By turns gut-wrenching, dark, funny, and ultimately transcendent, this is a must-read book by a writer of considerable depth and originality.
–Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works from 2003-2018

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Also, coming in 2020 & 2021:

– be/trouble by Bridgette Bianca
– The Depression by Mathias Svalina and Jon Pack
– Navigating With(out) Instruments by Traci Kato-Kiriyama
– The Secret Lives of Negroes by Ernest Hardy

1.  What’s your favorite song to dance to?
I’m on maternity leave with my seven-week-old baby right now, so I spend a lot of my time holding and rocking and soothing her. I discovered by accident that she calms down when I dance her around to “Hey Larocco” by Rayland Baxter, so that’s our current jam.

2. Describe your personal hell.
I’m in a small, windowless room. It’s cold and I have no blankets or extra clothes to put on. My eyes hurt. I’m thirsty. I have a UTI and a nasty cold. I’m exhausted but can’t sleep. And I know my situation will never improve and I will never die.

3.  What’s something that always makes you laugh?
When my husband texts this to me a propos of nothing, which he’s been doing for years and years. It’s from a Mitchell & Webb show, another thing that always makes me laugh.

 

 

 

4. You’re sucked into a bad movie and you have to choose a point in history to live out the rest of your years. What time do you choose and why?
This is hard because all eras suck in one way or another. I guess I’d go to the ’70s so I could see The Ramones in their prime? I don’t know. This is why I don’t write historical fiction.

5. What’s a gif that you can relate to?

6.  You’re hit by lightning. What happens?
I pass out, hopefully survive, and wake up with a cool scar.

7. It’s snowing outside, how do you feel?
Excited and unprepared, putting on tights under jeans and all the sweaters I own because I’m from California and don’t know what I’m doing. I love sledding and stuff, but I see snow maybe once every few years and I’m usually over it and want to go inside after like 20 minutes.

8. What’s a cat picture you can get behind?
Pictures of my own cats, Iggy the tuxedo daredevil and Katla the calico empath.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

9. Where did you write most of your book? Why?
I do the vast majority of my writing in coffee shops, and this book was no different. I need the ambient noise because I find silence distracting, and I need to be away from home so I’m not tempted to procrastinate with dishes or laundry. Coldwater Canyon was written in various coffee shops in North Hollywood and Los Feliz.

10. What are your struggles and strengths as a writer?
I struggle with plot. It’s really difficult for me to decide what will “happen” and how to work out all the logistics. My strengths are mood-setting and resonant imagery. That’s the part that flows naturally and doesn’t feel like work, even when I’m rewriting the same sentence twenty times.

11. Tell us a little about your writing process. What works, what doesn’t, what doesn’t but you still try anyway
Each project is a little different, but I always have to get pretty far into something, even all the way through a draft, before I figure out what I’m getting at and what I want to say. That’s when I can go back and start over with intention and awareness of where I’m going. I’ve tried writing by hand but I just can’t, as much as I see the value in it. My hand cramps up and my writing is illegible. But when I finish a draft, I always print it out and make notes on the page as I read through it. Having the physical object to refer to is crucial for me to be able to wrap my head around the whole.

 

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ANNE-MARIE KINNEY is the author of two novels, Radio Iris (2012, Two Dollar Radio) and Coldwater Canyon(forthcoming from CCM in 2018). A New York Times Editor’s Choice pick, Radio Iris was called “a spiky debut” and “‘The Office’ as scripted by Kafka” by the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Her shorter work has been published in journals including Alaska Quarterly Review, The Rattling Wall, The Collagist, Fanzine and Black Clock, for which she also served as Production Editor from 2011-2016. She lives in Los Angeles, where she co-curates the Griffith Park Storytelling Series.

1. What’s your favorite song to dance to?
Lalji Pandey’s “Jimmy Jimmy Ajaa Ajaa” from Bollywood’s Disco Dancer movie circa the early 1980s.

2. Describe your personal hell.
I am sorry I don’t understand.

3. What’s something that always makes you laugh?
Some of my dog’s innovatively coy begging ways and almost anything Gene from Bob’s Burgers says.

4. You’re sucked into a bad movie and you have to choose a point in history to live out the rest of your years. What time do you choose and why?
I guess I’d just choose this moment and live out the rest of my years from here.

5. What’s a gif that you can relate to?
I don’t know but I like the ones where there’s animals and/or dancing.

6. You’re hit by lightning. What happens?
The Lichtenberg Figures (but I only know that from poetry) or I might die?

7. It’s snowing outside, how do you feel?
Calm.

8. What’s a cat picture you can get behind?
I mean—in-house bias but—the Accomplices’ three cat, ramen hat picture is pretty great.

 

 

 

 

 

9. Where did you write most of your book? Why?
The compositions were mostly written on a Sony Vaio laptop circa 2002 because my parents so very generously purchased it for me as a happy birthday/congratulations and good luck to you in MA school gift. As a revision strategy, I rewrote each poem by hand in a large notebook as well.

10. What are your struggles and strengths as a writer?
One strength is that I always believe in writing but a struggle is that I don’t always believe in my own writing.

11. Tell us a little about your writing process. What works, what doesn’t, what doesn’t but you still try anyway?
My writing process changes but it is most always driven by ritual and revision. Like for example I’ve been blocked, or very very slow, in coming up with new stuff for about fifteen months now; so for the time being what doesn’t work is putting pressure on myself to make something new and hurried, reading and rereading (my stuff and other writing) works.

 

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SOHAM PATEL is a Kundiman fellow and an assistant editor at Fence and The Georgia Review. Her chapbooks include and nevermind the storm (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2013) New Weather Drafts (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2016), and in airplane and other poems (oxeye, 2018).