GOING SOLO TO SEE KAREN RUSSELL READ FROM HER NEW COLLECTION OF FICTIVE MAGIC AT THE FREE LIBRARY TONIGHT. I’M SUPER STOKED AND ALMOST NERVOUS TO BE IN HER PRESENCE.

Just got back from the reading. Talked to Karen Russell about spiritualism and ectoplasm. She wished me luck with Rutgers. I hope I see her in September. 

"

The past is a fiction that absorbs us.

Its not theft, [its] an act of generosity; you lay yourself open to a form of occult possession. You complete the other man’s work. The job doesn’t end with death. And neither does it belong to any individual. The writers were mediums; they articulated, they gave a shape to some pattern of energy that was already present. They got in on the curve of time, so that by writing, by holding off the inhibiting reflex of the rational mind, they were able to [compose] a text that was prophetic.

"

—  Iain Sinclare

"She told me she saw los espiritus, los muertos, our dead. She told me mi abuela could hear them, feel them, hear them laugh and weep. My whole family believed that she was blessed, that she had a gift from La Senora; that she commune[d] with the dead. Women with lids dark from mourning and eyes red from tears would line up after mass to tell her the names of their babies born still and silent, of husbands gone missing or found cold in the streets."

— la cocina (how we are haunted)

INTERNET DREAM CAFE

TITLE OF A SHORT STORY BY ME, INSPIRED BY CHINATOWN

GIVING UP THE GHOST, 110 PGS., COMPLETED AND TURNED IN

“The little girl dead behind the rosebushes came back to life, and the passionate construction continued” (Barthelme 126). 

EXCERPT FROM “AT RISK”

“…the ‘Devil’ that isn’t real.”