Good riddance, failures. Today ends this column, at least in weekly form, which for the 15 weeks past has detailed a series of missteps, blind alleys, redirections, redactions, and lessons never learned. Ok, I know, many of the writers in this space and its readers have intimated lessons, although this was never my intent. To [...]
Posts Tagged ‘#AuthorFail’
#Author Fail 16: Wendy Walker
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged #AuthorFail, Exploring fiction, failure, Helen, Homer, Iliad, Open City, Paris, Parisian, The City Under the Bed, The Denver QUarterly, Troy, Wendy Walker on September 19, 2011 | 1 Comment »
#AuthorFail 15: Jeff Bursey
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged #AuthorFail, Batman, Cande Nast, Doc Savage, Enfield & Wizenty, failure, G-8, Henry Miller, heroes, Jeff Bursey, Newfoundland, Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal, Paper Empire, Phillip José Farmer, Pulpseed, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, The Shadow, The Spider, Verbatim: A Novel, William Gaddis on September 12, 2011 | 3 Comments »
Welcome, dear failures, to the penultimate #AuthorFail…super-hero edition. My Schnide-y sense is tingling, and it says this column will soon go the way of the dodo. Until then, let us revel in our ineptitude. **** The Shadow. The Spider. G-8. I thought of these pulp heroes on seeing the first Burton Batman movie, and as [...]
#AuthorFail 14: Greg Olear
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged #AuthorFail, 666, apocalypse, Babylon, Babylon is Fallen, bible, failure, Fathermucker, four horsemen, Gomorrah, Gothic, Greg Olear, Jehovah, Jesus Christ, manuscript, McDonald's, My Brain is Full, Nostradamus, old testament, plague, st. john, The Nervous Breakdown, Totally Killer, WWW, Zeus on September 5, 2011 | 4 Comments »
The Beast Rises (well, not really). Dare we call this a triumph against evil? Until next week…. **** My Brain Is Full, my first completed novel, concerned the creative frustrations of a pretentious twenty-two-year old college junior—no big shock, as its author was also a pretentious twenty-two-year old college junior. I printed up a bunch [...]
#AuthorFail 13: Debra Di Blasi
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged #AuthorFail, C2/University of Alabama Press, Cannes International Film Festival, Cinovation Screenwriting Award, Coffee House Press, Debra Di Blasi, Drought, Drought & Say What You Like, fiction, he Diagram Innovative Fiction Award, horpe Menn Book Award, Jaded Ibis Press, Jaded Ibis Productions, James C. McCormick Fellowship, Minneapolis, New Directions, New York, Novel(la), Prayers of an Accidental Nature, short film, Skin of the Sun, the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, The Jirí Chronicles & Other Fictions, The Way Men Kiss, Universe Elle on August 29, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Welcome back, my friends, to lucky #13. My good friend and publisher, Debra Di Blasi, speaks best for herself. Go failure! **** Seems everybody has a memoir these days. Seems I’ve been trying to have one for years. Like an egg that won’t drop. A stuck turd. The opposite of purgation. Ah, yes, shit. Indeed, [...]
#AuthorFail 12: Stephanie Strickland
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged #AuthorFail, Alexander Holroyd, Arthur T. White, bells, Bill Casselman, Change Ringing Software, Dear Navigator, digital media, e-literature, electronic, Electronic Literature, Electronic Literature Collection, Grandsire Triples, literature, Nick Montfort, Plain Bob, Reverse Canterbury, SAIC, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Sea and Spar Between, site swap, Stephanie Strickland, The Mathematics of Juggling, Wikipedia, Zone: Zero on August 22, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Ring the bells, sort of. Stephanie Strickland is a wonder of compelling poetic investigations. Experiencing her works–try “slippingglimpse” for a quick fix–is only slightly less exciting than having coffee with her. In either setting, she’ll offer a series of interconnections between things that appear to have no interconnection, so that rising from the table after [...]
#AuthorFail 11: Roxane Gay
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged #AuthorFail, (E)Motion, And Then We Came to the End, AYITI, collection, displacement, Fail, flight attendants, Joshua Ferris, Lake Forest College, migrant workers, missionaries, Mormon, movement, PANK, POV, Roxane Gay, short stories, thesis, traveling strippers, truck drivers, What We Do When We Are Together, William Gillespie on August 15, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Welcome, fellow duds, also-rans, has-beens, and cast-offs. I had followed Roxane Gay’s intriguing online posts over the recent years, and somehow stumbled upon the fact that she teaches at Eastern Illinois University. Delighted by this relative proximity to my Chicago-area enclave of Lake Forest College, I invited her to join a panel on publishing (given [...]
#AuthorFail 9: Richard Thomas
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged #AuthorFail, 3:AM Magazine, Allah, bonfire, Buddah, Cemetery Dance, ChiZine, Christ, Christopher Allan Budding, Dogmatika, Enter the World of Filaria, Murky Depths, Opium, PANK, Pear Noir!, Peter Straub, Philip K. Dick, Richard Thomas, Shivers VI, Stephen King, The Nervous Breakdown, Transubstantiate, Vain, Waking Life, World Riot on August 1, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Hello, losers. Remember those George Burns Oh, God! movies? Richard Thomas (maybe) does. (This also calls to mind Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind [1976], a favorite of William S. Burroughs). Even if we can’t all quite agree with Thomas’ assessment of the “rules” of writing (I’m in [...]
#AuthorFail 8: Alexandra Chasin
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged #AuthorFail, Alexandra Chasin, Anzio effect, dogs, Dr. Henry K. Beecher, Dr. Paul Brand, Elaine Scarry, Emily Dickinson, Harvard Medical School, Kissed By, Lang College, McGill Pain Questinnaire, New York, On Being Ill, Pavlov, Philip Yancey, Ronald Melzack, The Body in Pain, The Gift of Pain, The New School, The Waves, Virginia Woolf, World War II on July 25, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Greetings, earth people, from the (pain) planet failure. Here, the atmosphere is different. The stars are different. The entire sense of the project-to-be, an examination by NYC writer (and my collaborator) Alexandra Chasin, requires more preliminary work into the nature of the question: and what of it, when the question is pain? Here, the question [...]
#AuthorFail 7: Robin Becker
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged #AuthorFail, Arkansas, Brains: A Zombie Memoir, feminist, HarperCollins, Memoir, Nabokov, post-modern, Robin Becker, Spank, Toad Suck, UCA, Zombie on July 18, 2011 | 3 Comments »
Robin Becker is a take-no-prisoners sort of writer. She’s unafraid of zombies, and even if I thought her original subtitle for Brains (see below) to be superior–”A Zomoir”–she knows when to change tracks. Thus, her entry for #AuthorFail is the rare instance where one’s agent (rare enough, perhaps) asks for the manuscript one wishes had [...]
#AuthorFail 6: Jarret Middleton
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged #AuthorFail, AD Jamesonm, Al Green, An Dantomine Eerly, Beat, Beat Generation, Credence Clearwater Revival, Dark Coast Press, DCP, Dream Songs, Henry Miller, J.R.D. Middleton, James Franco, Jarret Middleton, John Berryman, Lautremont, New Hampshire, nietzche, Robin Becker, Smith-Corona on July 11, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Welcome, fellow failures, to our weekly support group. As you all know, poetry is largely worthless. How often do you see anyone but “poets” or “earnest” “students” “reading” this treacle anyway. When’s the last time you gave your “mother” a contemporary poetry collection for X-Mas? You might also be interested to know that writers “suffer” [...]
#AuthorFail 5: A D Jameson
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged #AuthorFail, A D Jameson, Amazing Adult Fantasy, Chinese, Chronicles of Narnia, Curtis White, DePaul University, dragons, Epic of Gilgamesh, Facets Multimedia, Fiction International, Giant Slugs, Kurt Cobain, Lake Forest College, Lawrence and Gibson, Lemuria, Mutable Sound, Requited, SAIC, Seattle, Siam Square, StoryStudio Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago, WTO on July 4, 2011 | 5 Comments »
Is Big Other a failure? Of course, in every way. See the proof below from our own AD Jameson, who ever-so-mildly breaks the rules of this column (submit!: see this), by stating that he might return to his long-suffering project, detailed below. Even so, we may root for his continued and everlasting failure on this [...]
#AuthorFail 4: Jeffrey DeShell
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged #AuthorFail, Arthouse, FC2, In Heaven Everything is Fine, Jeffrey DeShell, Peter: An (A) Historical Romance, S&M, Starcherone, The Peculiarity of Literature: An Allegorical Approach to Poe's Fiction, The Trouble With Being Born on June 27, 2011 | 7 Comments »
It’s Monday morning. The yawning gulf of your workweek stretches before you like a festering baby mouth. How long until the cold monotony of this unmatched abyss becomes heated, for a short moment, by the weekly report known in your heart of hearts as #AuthorFail? Ho! The time for failure, my cubicle-bound friend, is now. [...]
#AuthorFail 3: Gretchen E. Henderson
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged #AuthorFail, &NOW BOOKS, Galerie de Difformite, Green Lantern Press, Gretchen E. Henderson, Jeffrey DeShell, linguistics, Madeleine P. Plonsker, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, On Marvelous Things Heard, Sean Beaudoin, Starcherone Books, The House Enters the Street, Ultra Sounds on June 20, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Are you a failure? Do your loved ones turn their heads away in shame when you walk in the room or go off to “work” on your “writing”? Is the blank page better for you when it’s blank? Ok, ok, I kid. I exaggerate. So welcome, anyway, to this week’s installment of #AuthorFail. Check here [...]
#AuthorFail 2: Sean Beaudoin
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged #AuthorFail, Fade to Blue, Glimmer Train, Going Nowhere Faster, High Power, murder, mystery, narrative, Render Janes Is Dead, Sean Beaudoin, Southwest Airlines, Spirit, The Infects, The New Orleans Review, The Onion, The San Francisco Chronicle, You Killed Wesley Payne on June 13, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Welcome to #AuthorFail (want to get in on this thing? Check here for guidelines.) This week’s installment (cue old-timey radio-play music), traces Sean Beaudoin’s novel-that-never-was-which-almost-became-an-app-that-never-was. Picture Sean right now, perhaps playing around with one of the project’s sprawling sentences the way a cat beats about a bloodied mouse. Lawd, take pity on us poor writers. [...]
#AuthorFail 1: Mark Spitzer
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged #AuthorFail, After the Orange Glow, Ahadada, Animal Planet, Arthur Rimbaud, Black Heron, Blaise Cendrars, Bottom Feeder, Charles Bukowski, CHODE!, Chum, City Lights, Ecco Press, Exquisite Corpse, Four Walls Eight Windows, Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, Leonardo DiCaprio, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Mark Spitzer, Monkey Puzzle, Monkey Puzzle Press, Polemic Press, Riding the Unit, River Monsters, Season of the Gar, Seven Stories, Six Gallery Press, Spuyten Duyvil; Age of the Demon Tools, The Genet Translations, The Pigs Drink from Infinity, Toad Suck Review, UNO Press, Writer in Residence on June 6, 2011 | 5 Comments »
#AuthorFail is a new column at BigOther. For the details on how to submit, check here. The column looks for instances that bury achievement and redemption and genius and artistic growth and special-ness beneath the crushing failure that often constitutes the material experience of art making and so runs counter to the individual myth(s) which [...]
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#AuthorFail 10: Laura Goldstein
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged #AuthorFail, American Letters and Commentary, Carl Sagan, Chicago, CutBank Reviews, Dancing Girl Press, Day of Answers, EOAGH, Facts of Light, Gertrude Stein, Harper’s Magazine, Hex Press, How2, Ice in Intervals, Laura Goldstein, Let Her, Little Red Leaves, Moria, Otoliths, Plumberries Press, poetry, Rabbit Light Movies, Red Rover, Requited, Seven Corners, star, Text/Sound, Tir Aux Pigeons on August 8, 2011 | 5 Comments »
Um, well, this is embarrassing: if you checked this post this morning between 9 am – 9:26, you would have found an incomplete entry: devoid of this snappy opening, and truncated, it the main text, from its full form. Could it be that #AuthorFail has had its first fail? Would this then equal success. I [...]
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