"Speak Easy Symmetry" by Audri Sousa

I'm happy to announce that Audri Sousa has a new e-chap up at Gold Wake Press called "Speak Easy Symmetry". I'm honored she sent it to us. Audri's use of surreal imagery, stream of consciousness, of wordplay, she strips rationality down to its essence, into a kind of proto-language we're all familiar with but can't always recognize as the magnet to which our alphabet is attracted, where letters gather in specific patterns of sound to form words which, ironically, we use to remind ourselves of their potential according to us, as well as our own creativity relative to them. Please check it out.

The Summer Issue of Ghoti Magazine

The summer issue of Ghoti is up, and it includes a chapter from The Immortals Act Their Age called "Tour Guides." There's lots of great ice cream in this issue, as well a review of Shane Jones' Light Boxes, which I'm sad to say I still haven't read. I can't even afford books for my classes. I just saw there's also a review of Charles Lennox's phenomenal MLP chap A Field of Colors. Peep it.

J.A. Tyler's "The Zoo, A Going"

If you're one of the four or five people who read this blog, I hope you're aware that J.A. Tyler will be publishing his novel(la), The Zoo, A Going, piece by piece, exhibit by exhibit, here. He'll publish each exhibit for 24 hours, and then delete it, and on to the next we'll go with water bottles and sunscreen.

It's a rare opportunity to read in full a work I've been following as its pieces have appeared in online journals. Each piece I read, I go, "Damn," and marvel at what nature is capable of producing, at how Tyler's captured these beasts, let alone contained them within the page's barren habitat, where they somehow manage to thrive...

Molly Gaudry's "Parts"

I just got Molly Gaudry's Parts in the mail (which sounds strange, but really it's quite chaste), an excerpt from her upcoming novella in verse, We Take Me Apart. It's really amazing, full of rich imagery, such as: "[W]omen strolling through fields of wildflowers & all the wildflowers' pollen lifting into the air & attaching like metal shavings to a magnet". That's great.

The way she continually uses "I liked to..." implies that, by the time I've read this, she's already changed. This isn't her anymore. When I finish reading, I've changed. I'm not me. None of us are who we are, as we're all of us always developing, always a different person, if I can here view women and men through the looking glass of the same kaleidoscope, because all that's just material. The body develops, then what?

As Molly says: "I like to think now of these women in the moments of their undressing / fragmentary / ripe for fertilization". Then, we must strip away what's unnecessary, take the small bits of life we have, the small fragments of who we are, and from them we must produce, and that's what Molly's done here.

Two Small Novels

I just learned Pangur Ban Party will be publishing my small novel, The Dying Bloom, as an e-book some time in the next few months. It will be my first published novel. It's about things, like the end of the world, family, cannibalism, auto-cannibalism, a potential frostbite epidemic, a child's interpretation of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and teenagers on hallucinogens playing a piano with sledgehammers during a fatal trip to Antarctica. I think.

To celebrate, I've decided to self-publish another small novel, Ox Crossing Drawbridge. It's got mermaids having a sackrace, a human cow, two pails of milk, heavily-armed cyborgs and a hologram with a moustache and a book of matches. It's about a population's shift from a genuinely humane and egalitarian society to a cold capitalist system, the loss of identity and the inability to return thereafter. I guess. I don't ever think I'd've ever seen it published anyway, so what the heck. Here it is.

Last Year's Mail

This is a letter I received last year in response to the submission of my first novel, Trawling Oblivion, to Melville House. It's from Dennis Loy Johnson, the editor and publisher. It reads as follows:

Dear Eric Beeny,

What a wild ride your Trawling Oblivion is! It's one of the funniest and most interestingly constructed books I've read in a while, and I was delighted to meet the intelligence behind it all ..... And yet I'm sorry to say I'm going to have to take a pass on it. Essentially, it's just too avant-gardist for us - much as I like it I don't think we could successfully market it. I kid you not in saying that I really enjoyed it thoroughly, though. If you ever find yourself straying more toward something just a tad more reliant on narrative, I hope you'll keep us in mind. I do admire your writing, meanwhile, and I'm flattered you asked us to consider it.

With all best wishes,

Dennis Loy Johnson

When I got this in the mail I felt this wave of happiness and fear, and I immediately felt that Dennis Loy Johnson was the nicest human being in the world. I just couldn't believe anyone would ever like any of the novels I'd ever write, especially a first novel. I've since written others, and I've also revised Trawling..., cutting out many things I thought no longer worked, whatever that means. I wrote Broken Antennas after Trawling..., which I think is definitely too weird and silly to ever publish. I've sent it here and there, but no one wants anything to do with it. I understand. (I want to quarantine some of its sections to construct smaller stories to add to a collection I'm also working on called Milk Like a Melted Ghost.)

Then I wrote my favorite, Lepers and Mannequins, which I sent out to Dennis Loy Johnson right after I'd finished it. I'm still nervously waiting to hear back. It's about a leper colony constantly at war with a mannequin tribe over spare parts, but of course one leper, Quall, is in love with a mannequin, Jaundice, so there's a certain Romeo and Juliet aesthetic to it, which isn't very original, but it's still a pretty strange, humorous and relevant novel, I think. It attempts to show how disconnected people are from each other, but especially from themselves (literally, in the story, with lepers losing limbs all over), and how humans tend to objectify other humans for their own purposes, including women, but mostly just people they don’t know or understand. Blah blah. I wrote Lepers... while recovering from an appendectomy, which seems appropriate since I was myself now sans one body part. Writing it was one of the happiest times I can remember being in a long time, with the exception of my daughter being born.

After that I started working on The Immortals Act Their Age, a novel of interconnected stories. For the most part it's pretty much a 'surreal fantasy,' like most of my other fiction. I think this novel's main theme is how humans not only interact with one another, but how, without even knowing it, they effect / affect each other from a distance by degrees of separation. I think Lepers... makes social commentary in the same manner. These discriptions are silly.

I've been working on and off on some other novels, too, like Mermaid Sackrace and The Quarantine Ceremony (semi-autobiographical), as well as small novels like The Dying Bloom and Ox Crossing Drawbridge. Whether these or the other novels are any good, whether they will ever see publication, I don't know (I sometimes think their titles are the only good parts). When I think about it, I feel happy and immediately afraid. To be honest, I don't feel like 'shopping them around' because I have no idea where to send them anymore (they've all been rejected a few times). But if I did start submitting my novels again, and if I could receive rejections like the one Dennis Loy Johnson sent me last year, I think I'd be happy with that.

Polemic @ Clockwise Cat

Issue #14 of Clockwise Cat is out, which includes a polemic of mine called "Not to Mention Macho." This issue is full of goodies, too numerous to mention. I still haven't finished reading all of it. Lots of good politics and satire... Check out the whole issue here.

Unscroll Vol. 2

Unscroll Volume 2 is up at Gold Wake Press, and it features some really great work, including a hauntingly beautiful prose poem by the wonderful Molly Gaudry, a rather enigmatic piece by Eric Burke, a crazy-good excerpt from The Jimmy Interludes by the formidable J.A. Tyler, a great poem by Ghoti editor CL Bledsoe, and an excerpt from an unpublished novella called Gossamer by Ben Spivey. Check it out. Thanks to everyone who contributed.

Lennox and Wells

"A Field of Colors" by Charles Lennox is now up at Keyhole. Still one of the hottest things I've ever read. I keep rereading it. It's comforting in so many unsettling ways. It's just great writing.

And speaking of great writing, Brandi Wells' new piece in decomP is sweet. Pretty much anything she writes is great.

The Roots of Independence

Fireworks are the quickest flowers,
blooming on stems of smoke,

exploding only a few brief moments
in a small patch of sky whose soil is darkness

their openings erase—we plant them once
a year above us, water them with tears,

but once we smile we forget they wither
from the slightest breath of awe—

we wake the next morning, the garden,
dead.