This January I got to chat with Thom Francis Job—one of the Albany area’s busiest champions of poets and writers—on his Sanctuary Radio program, which you can listen to RIGHT HERE! We talked about Albany, hometowns, personal growth, my books, and hitting the road to travel and accrue experiences worth writing about, and then Thom boiled it down to about 11 minutes of the best bits from our chat. He also included my reading of “Albany,” a poem I performed at The Linda in December of 2021. The poem also appears in my book, Both Ways Home. It was a pleasure to chat with Thom, who is always collaborating, networking, publishing, and hosting one thing or another to promote poetry in our area as part of the Hudson Valley Writers Guild. I hope you’ll drop in and give our talk a listen, and be sure to check out the other writers he’s interviewed. It’s an excellent series that encapsulates the wide spectrum of talent across the Capital Region of New York.
New Interview with Pine Hills Review
In a recent interview I gave to Jasmine Bates of the Pine Hills Review, I urged younger artists and writers to take to the road, travel, live somewhere new, and spend some time living a life worth writing about as early as they could. There are always risks involved in doing that, in quitting jobs and driving cross-country, but there are risks involved in staying put as well. Risk and mistakes are unavoidable, so why not go through with it and have something interesting to say afterward? But even with all my running around and zig-zagging around the country in my 20s, I kept ending up in two places, my two hometowns, which was the focus of my latest collection of poetry and fiction titled Both Ways Home. We talk about that in the interview as well, and I’m very honored that a hometown publication like Pine Hills Review took the time to talk about the book and my process. They’re a stellar literary organization and I hope you enjoy the interview.
New Interview With Albany Poets
Last month, Rebecca Schumejda took a few minutes to interview me about one of my latest books (Feral Kingdom), my online literary journal Hobo Camp Review, my bookshop review blog The Bookshop Hunter, and other projects I have coming up with poets Kevin Ridgeway and J Lester Allen. The interview is now posted over at Albany Poets, the best website for finding out what’s going on in the literary world in upstate New York. They do a lot of great things for the community and I hope you’ll check them out. Thanks for reading!
New Interview with NY Writer's Com.pen.dium
I recently had the pleasure of having a great phone chat with Jeff Doherty, one of the young writers over at NY Writer’s Com.pen.dium, a growing literary website highlighting events, writers, workshops, and publications in Upstate New York and beyond. Jeff threw some excellent questions my way about my writing inspirations, how writing evolves over time, how technology can help or hinder a writer, and also about my latest collection of short stories, Nights Without Rain. Our interview, titled “From Mysterious Figure to Mysterious Author,” is now posted at their website, and I hope you’ll take a look at their other interviews, write-ups, features, and literary event listings. My thanks to the editors and Jeff for reaching out! Enjoy!
My "Talk With Me" Interview with Marcia Epstein
Today I had an incredibly fun interview with Marcia Epstein on her hour-long "Talk With Me" podcast, where she speaks with poets, writers, and artists about their work, their lives, and how the two intertwine in happy, frightful, productive, and connective ways. We spoke about Hobo Camp Review and how it all began, my upcoming collection of poetry We Are All Terminal But This Exit Is Mine (which will be ready to release VERY soon!), and about my experiences going through cancer and trying to maintain some sort of "normalcy" in both writing and social aspects of my life, and also about trying to decide when, why, and how I wanted to share these experiences with those around me. It's the first time I spoke about all this in such a public way, and many of the poems I read on the show are about this time in my life as well. I hope you enjoy listening. You can also download the show at iTunes, I believe. A big thank you goes to Wolfgang Carstens for connecting me with Marcia. Wolfgang is a kickass poet, the editor of Epic Rites Press, and a Hobo Camp alum, so please look for his work! As far as my book, Bud Smith and I are in the final proof stages and it's almost ready to launch. I'll be giving away free extras with the first wave of books going out the door - more details about that soon. Thanks very much!
On the Air with 105.3 FM & The Sanctuary for Independent Media
I hit the airwaves last week at WOOC 105.3 FM alongside my Troy Poetry Mission co-host R.M. Engelhardt to talk to Meghan Marohn and Bryce Miller about our monthly reading series in Troy, NY, the recent StoryHarvest event at The Sanctuary for Independent Media, and how poetry and readings can help build community bonds. We even read some poems on the air. You can find our segment at the station's SoundCloud archives, along with a bunch of other insightful, informative interviews. I was caught a little off guard as I forgot to bring some poems with me (what's a poet without a poem!?!?) but I ended up finding and reading my new piece "Last Appointment of the Day," which will appear in my upcoming book, We Are All Terminal But This Exit Is Mine (Unknown Press, 2017). As I mention in the interview, the book will be out around Halloween. More details on that soon. Until then, listen in to 105.3 FM whenever you can! Thanks for listening, and thanks to Bryce Miller, Meghan Marohn, Steve Pierce and everyone at the Sanctuary for having us on the radio!
My Interview in Issue 5 of The Blue Mountain Review
The anniversary issue of The Blue Mountain Review is now live and includes an interview in which Clifford Brooks asks me about how Hobo Camp Review (my online literary magazine) came about, what advice I have for writers submitting work to magazines, what concerns I have about bad publishing practices like reading fees, and what new books I'm working on right now. The issue also includes a bunch of great poetry, fiction, other interviews, and Robert Pinksy is the featured author. Thanks for taking a look!
Interviewed by The Blue Mountain Review
Southern poet, rogue, and Pulitzer nominee Charles Clifford Brooks III interviewed me for the third issue of The Blue Mountain Review, and we discuss my thoughts on the literary community, where quality writing comes from, and of course, fight clubs...which don't exist, I promise, so please stop asking...ahem, anyway. The issue also includes three of my poems, "dawn and the empty bottle of wine," "Having Come Down the Mountain," and "How to Read the Braille of Your Heartstrings." You can read the entire issue online (I'm on page 89), and it includes a ton of other spectacular writers and poets, including Dr. John Ratledge, Regina Walker, Rowan Johnson, and others. Thank you for taking a look!
The Girl in the Mountain, New Interviews, and More
It has been quite a while since my last post, and my absence stems from a plethora of creative and non-creative brush-fires that kept me busy for weeks upon months, but I thought a little update post would do me some good, so here we are.
For starters, I finished the first draft of yet another novel, this one a 1940s-era noir/mystery titled The Girl in the Mountain. It is a fictional account of an actual crime from Vermont in the 1940s that went unsolved…or did it? My take offers a few more conventional and very unconventional possibilities to the real-life missing person case, and I have been calling it a “Humphrey Bogart meets The X-Files, with just a dash of Twin Peaks” type of story. I’m looking forward to starting the second draft before it goes out to a few choice agents. My deepest thanks to my test readers currently reading away!
Also in publishing news, my ninth collection of poetry is slated to appear this summer. Dark Heart Press is hoping to release my book, We Are All Terminal But This Exit is Mine this June. It’s a poetic examination of the hopeful expectations we place on adulthood as a child and the yearning nostalgia we have once he find adulthood isn’t all its cracked up to be, in all its painful and deadly ways.
Atop that I’ll have an interview in the next issue of The Blue Mountain Review, a short story appearing in the next issue of Drunk Monkeys, and a few pieces showing up in anthologies later in the year. So yes, things have been busy, but I hope to make more appearances here at this blog more often now that spring is here. Stay tuned!