Keyhole #6: Web Extras

So much good stuff collected for Keyhole #6...

WEB EXTRAS from Blake Butler, Sherrie Flick, Noam Mor, Josh Maday, Paul Long, Gillian Kiley, Sam White, Steve Katz (on Nabokov, Vonnegut, and Berryman), Davis Schneiderman (text and audio collaboration with Don Meyer), and a great podcast interview with Peter Conners on his new memoir, Growing Up Dead, conducted by Sam Ligon.

Check it out!

Keyhole #6 Available Now (plus web extras)

Peter Cole at Keyhole Press invited me to guest edit their sixth issue. It's out now and available for order at Keyhole Press. Here's my intro note for the issue:

GUEST EDITOR’S NOTE...
Can a journal achieve beloved status after just five issues? If that journal is Keyhole, then the answer is yes. In a little over a year, Peter Cole and his cohort of editors have earned the affection of writers and readers by doing things the right way. They produce a quality product—in print and on the web—and they promotetheir writers effectively.

But it's more than that. There's a warmth in Keyhole's approach and a lack of pretension. They've been publishing some innovative work, and they've taken some risks (like the
handwritten issue, Keyhole #5). And perhaps most importantly, they've been keeping a quarterly schedule as they expand the number of pages in each issue and their circulation.
Guest editing Keyhole #6 has been the most fun I've had in a long time. And it was easy. To fill these pages, I contacted some old friends from the University of New Hampshire (Sam
Ligon and Sherrie Flick); I sent queries to a few writers who read at the 2008 &Now Festival of Innovative Writing (Steve Katz, Davis Schneiderman, Renee D'Aoust, and Noam Mor); I
solicited work from writers whose work I have admired recently (Kim Chinquee, Blake Butler, Matt Bell, Tao Lin, Amelia Gray, Cooper Esteban, Brooklyn Copeland, and John Domini); I
turned to three colleagues who also happen to be talented poets (Darcie Dennigan, Gillian Kiley, and Paul Long); and Gillian kindly directed me to a few more talented poets (Jason Stumpf,
Margaret Funkhouser, and Sam White). To complete this issue, Micah Lang, Keyhole Deputy Editor, solicited a short from (the great) Michael Martone, who recently judged Keyhole's first fiction chapbook competition.

I would like to thank Peter for inviting me to help him put this issue together and for featuring my work in past issues. And thanks to Sarah Stanley for designing another great Keyhole
cover. I would also like to make a special thanks to Michael Kimball for conferring the cool of his Life Stories on a Postcard series to this issue. In place of conventional contributor bios at the back of this issue, Michael interviewed each contributor and wrote their life story on a postcard. As a result, Keyhole #6 is 100% all lit on every single page.

PLUS: Keyhole let me program their web this week. Check out web extras from Paul Long, Same White, Gillian Kiley, Davis Schneiderman, Steve Katz, Josh Maday, Blake Butler, Sherrie Flick, Noam Mor, and a podcast interview with Peter Conners about his forthcoming memoir, Growing Up Dead.

Upcoming Reading

I am scheduled to read in Sudbury, Massachusetts on February 25 at 60nobscot. Details:

The Third installment of The Waking Dream Press Reading Series returns to 60nobscot on Wednesday, February 25th (7:30PM). The theme for the evening is Lust, Longing, and Letting Go.

Four contemporary authors will be reading from and discussing their work:

Helen Marie Casey is a prizewinning poet & author of two chapbooks of poetry: Fragrance Upon His Lips, a series of poems about Joan of Arc, and Inconsiderate Madness, a series of poems about Mary Dyer, who was hanged in Boston in 1660.

Marguerite McGrail has appeared in The Watermark and The Local, and she is the winner of the Marcia Keach Prize for Poetry. Her latest chapbook of poetry with original photographs is Familiars.

William Walsh is the author of Without Wax: A Documentary Novel. His fiction has appeared in New York Tyrant, Caketrain, Rosebud, Juked, Fringe, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and other journals.

Marc Zegans is a critically acclaimed poet, playwright and author whose work includes Night Work, a spoken word album (Philistine Records, 2007) and Pillow Talk (G-Spot Press). He performs regularly in the Boston area.

Address: 60 Nobscot Road Sudbury, MA 01776 (Map)

Workshop: Generative Writing Constraints

I am scheduled to lead a writing workshop in the Continuing Studies Program at Brown University in early 2009.

The info:

Creative Constraints: Generating New Ideas in Fiction Can imposing artificial writing conditions free your creative process? Writing constraints are consciously selected structures, forms, and limitations selected by the writer prior to writing. Compositions made with constraints often allow you to say things you hadn’t expected to say in ways you would never have chosen.

Working with the precept that all creative writing is constrained, we will examine and experiment with pre-set forms of poetry (sestina, sonnet, villanelle, haiku) and narrative prose (sketches of exactly 100 words, flash fiction, source-text manipulations). Through controlled use of form and expression, writing prompts will help you generate new ideas. No matter what level you’re writing at, this course can liberate you from cliché, challenge your unconscious writing routines, and help you condense the decision making process when writing time is limited.

The workshop runs for six weeks, meeting on Thursdays (7-9PM), from February 5th through March 12th.

Register here. If you have questions regarding this course, please feel free to email me, William_Walsh@brown.edu.

Reading Lists

Lamination Colony's winter '08 issue features reading lists provided by Blake Butler, Michael Kimball, Tao Lin, Roy Kesey, Elizabeth Ellen, Kevin Sampsell, Eugene Lim, and others.

I limited my list to books that I've read more than once and expect to read again.

Check it out...

Keyhole 5: The Handwritten Issue

Keyhole Magazine Issue 5, the Handwritten Issue is now available and it is an awesome thing to look at and an interesting reading experience.

Includes work from Kein Sampsell, Steve Auscherman, Matt Bell, Aaron Burch, Blake Butler, Kim Chinquee, Elizabeth Ellen, Kathy Fish, Sherrie Flick, Rosanne Griffeth, Jenny Hanning, Lauren Van Den Berg, Beth Thomas, Rosanne Griffith, and others.

My two pieces:"Daddy Sang Bass," a story fragment about a bass duo squatting in their rented rehearsal space; and "Two Pies," a story in ouline about a thirteen year old boy stealing apples, flour, eggs, butter, sugar, and brown sugar so his mother can bake two pies -- one for him and one for a man she plans to seduce.

New Anthology from Casperian Books

I've got a story called "Icewater" in Casperian Books' first story anthology, And Now for a Story...

The anthology also includes selections from Casperian's growing roster, including Curtis Smith, A.F. Rützy, Sybil Baker, Lily Richards, and Paul Elwork, whose novel The Tea House was just optioned from Casperian by Amy Einhorn Books, a division of Penguin.

The Margaret Atwoods at Sir!

Brian James Foley has posted the first issue of Sir!

Wild stuff from the likes of Blake Butler, Brooklyn Copeland, Mike Young, Zachary Schomburg, Peter Schwartz, Juliet Cook, and Noah Falck.

My short is called "The Margaret Atwoods".

Villanelle at Faraway

Pursuing my interest in writing with constraints and pre-set forms, I wrote a villanelle called "El Camino," which you can read at Faraway, a fairly new journal from Inland Empire, California.

"El Camino" is your typical villanelle about NASCAR, Southern Rock, and car-truck hybrids, dedicated it to Paul Westerberg.

Check it out!

Villanelle: A 19-line poem of fixed form consisting of five tercets and a final quatrain, with the first and third lines of the first tercet repeated alternately as a refrain closing the succeeding stanzas and joined as the final couplet of the quatrain.

Some New Good Words on Wax

From Jeff Vande Zande, an English Professor from Michigan and author of several books, including Into The Desperate Country.

Briefly, from Jeff's post dated August 24: "The real magic of William Walsh’s Without Wax (Casperian Books) is Walsh’s ability to make the reader have so much empathy and sympathy for the protagonist, Wax Williams..."

Icewater

An older story called "Icewater" is appearing in two places almost at once. You can read it now at Wheelhouse, and it will be included in Casperian Books soon-to-be-released anthology, And Now For A Story.

Also, stories appearing soon: "A Prayer to the Patron Saint of Pretty Girls" will be in the first issue of Pear Noir; a short called "The Poet's Revise" will be up at This Zine Will Change Your Life (sometime in March); and "The Margaret Atwoods" will be in the first issue of Sir! sometime soon.

Confirming Your Appointment with Dr. Maroon

FlatmanCrooked is featuring a new story called Dr. Maroon.

IT'S LIKE THIS:

Steve’s new doctor is considered to be the number one blood man in the country. His name is Dr. Maroon. He is older than aspirin. He’s been reading Steve’s case history for three months, but they’ve met only once.

“I want to recommend something radical,” Dr. Maroon says with a twinkle in his ancient eyes.

“Radical?” Steve says, the word clogging in his constricted throat. “Like what?”

“Leeches.”

...AND IT'S LIKE THIS:

Amenia. To Juliana, the word sounds like an answer to a prayer. There are something like a thousand case studies about women with amenia, she discovers online. Gymnasts. Figure skaters. Long-distance runners. They workout so much that their cycles stop. They don’t menstruate for months, years in some cases.

...AND IT'S ALSO LIKE THIS:

“What about your children,” Dr. Maroon asks Decoder.

Decoder tells Dr. Maroon that his kids make him feel like he’s like living with cartoon characters. This is a joke he often uses with older clients, so he figures Dr. Maroon will get a kick out of it. But he doesn’t seem to get it at all.

New Keyhole Website

Keyhole has launched a new very cool website design. In addition to great new stories from Kim Chinquee, and Thomas Cooper, and poems from Alexandra Zobel, and Samantha Arlotta, they're running a Blake Butler interview with Tao Lin.

And they dug into their archives to re-post an interview that Jon Bergey conducted with me earlier this year.

Now on Titular

New short up today at Titular: A Journal of New Beginnings. Titular is a high-concept journal that publishes new stories titled after movies, books, and television shows.

My short is called Punch-Drunk Love. It's about two brothers: one's a hobo and the other is a hermit. It's named after the Adam Sandler movie that was directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.

Lots of good stuff at Titular from the likes of Kim Chinquee, Sam Pink, Matthew Simmons, Blake Butler, Jimmy Chen, Corey Mesler, and others.

In The Phoenix

Inviting everyone to read a new review of Without Wax and interview in this week’s Providence Phoenix.

Life Story on a Postcard

Michael Kimball, author of two of my favorite recent novels The Way The Family Got Away and How Much Of Us There Was, has written my life story on a postcard. I'm number 58 in this ongoing series. Recent subjects in the Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story Life Story on a Postcard include Heather Fowler, Joy Leftow, Peter Cole, Graham Nunn, Josh Maday, Gina Myers, Karen Lillis, Adam Robinson, and Anna Lenik, among others. Read them all.

Michael wrote my life story with an imposed constraint: he agreed to forego an interview and write my life story based on what he's learned about me over the past year or so via our many email exchanges.

Michael's new novel, Dear Everybody, will be out this fall.

Thanks, Michael.

Better Together

Amazon.com says Without Wax and Creamy Bullets, Kevin Sampsell's new collection, are better together. Buy us together for $26.66.

New Review at Gently Read Literature

Brandon Schultz shares some sincere thoughts on Without Wax at Daniel Sumrall's wonderful book blog Gently Read Literature.

Reading in Cambridge

On August 1, 2008 I will be reading as part of the Dire Literary Series with Xujun Eberlein and Gloria Mindock at the Out of the Blue Art Gallery (106 Prospect Street /Cambridge, Mass).

Hosted by Timothy Gager, the Dire Literary Series is a Boston Phoenix 2008 Best of Boston Winner.

Show starts at 8 p.m. with an open mic program.

Reading | Ada Books | August 2nd | 7:00 pm

I'll be reading with Brian James Foley at Ada Books in Providence, RI on August 2nd. Brian's poems and stories have appeared in or are forthcoming in Juked, LIT, Pequin, Caketrain, Elimae, Word Riot, and many other fine journals. His chapbook entitled The Tornado is not a Surrealist is available NOW from Greying Ghost Press, and he is about to launch a new online lit mag called SIR! Show starts at 7:00 PM.

Ada Books is located at 330 Dean Street, just off Westminster Street.

Judging Minnesota: miniStories

Directing Minnesota short story writers to a special contest. I'm serving as one of four judges for the summer leg of the MNartists miniStories contest. Submission guidelines are available at MNartisits.org.

Keyhole #1 at ISSUU

Check out this new way to deliver a literary journal:

Book Notes at Largehearted Boy

One of my favorite features on the web is the Book Notes series at Largehearted Boy.

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that is in some way relevant to their recently published books. Some fine writers have made virtual mixtapes for this series, including Ben Greenman, Tao Lin, Peggy Munson, Jeff Parker, Zachary Lazar, Brian Evenson, and (the genius)Lynne Tillman, to name a few.

Now it is my turn. Check out my Book Notes mixtape for Without Wax.

Hang the DJ.

NewPages Review of Without Wax

I am excited to share a new review of Without Wax just posted at NewPages.

New Review: Without Wax

Matt Bell has posted an extended review of Without Wax at his super sharp litblog.

Check it out.