Thursday, December 23, 2010

TNSR

Merry Christmas to me! The Fledgling Nova Scotia Review, an annual print journal from out east, has picked up my story "Blindspots," a tragicomic tale of faulty testicles, driving instruction, and a dead octogenarian redhead.

Looks like it'll be out in early summer, 2011. Will keep you posted. Since this is the inaugural issue, there is no image of the magazine for me to use in this post. So I'm posting a picture of Nova Scotia. See? Good!

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Merry Christmas / Bad Writing / Dan Tysdal

Merry Christmas, you people. Here is your present - a trailer from a movie I want to see. I think you might want to see it too.



What else? Oh! If you're thinking of buying a book for a loved one this Christmas, consider the following:



Description:

An unconventional and profound mixed-media poetry collection that blends traditional and avant garde forms to explore remembrance, grief, and mourning.

Daniel Scott Tysdal follows up his first award-winning collection of poetry with The Mourner’s Book of Albums, an emotionally striking and formally ambitious exploration of the elegiac tradition and the twenty-first-century attitude to remembrance and grief. Encountering a wide range of arresting events—from a best friend’s suicide to the war in Afghanistan, from improvised memorials to the plastinated corpses of Body Worlds—these innovative poems survey the forces and forms that shape what and how we mourn. The sonically lively lines, the vivid images, and the richly textured voices of the The Mourner’s Book of Albums are composed in a variety of traditional and unconventional forms—the lyric, the ballad, the graphic poem, and the fabricated document, to name a few—as a means of grappling with the many acts and practices that link the living and the dead. Tysdal compiles the albums, however fluid and fragile, that hold them together.


Dan is really good and funny and this collection is good and funny too. I know the title of this post suggests that Dan is a bad writer. This is not true. Just FYI.