Author: Greg Gerke

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Why Write?

Startup Stock Photos

WHY WRITE?

At a recent event I hosted, I asked the assembled writers this question. Besides the “practical ordering of my reality” type of answer, there were also some surprises: one woman had been a classical singer, but failed, and needed to embark on something else having to do with language. One man said, I write to talk about what I read—equally unassuming. I began to think that it would be much more stimulating to know why certain writers wrote than to engage with anything they had written, especially fiction or poetry—two ultimate forms needing years of practice. It’s debatable who said, “Everyone has a book in them…” but the second clause of that sentence, as uttered by Christopher Hitchens, is as concretely dismissive of the first: “…but in most cases, that’s where it should stay.” Who would have thought there were so many writers, that oodles would have the calling—many thanks to the internet? Now there is no barrier to that fusty adage, but it might be better to say, Everyone has some opinions in them. Continue reading →

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A New Gary Lutz Story and an Expanded Book

Gary Lutz’s story “Loo” is now at 3am Magazine.

Ken Sparling’s “It Came Out of My Head” and Three Stories by Joanna Ruocco have also been recently published.

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From Future Tense Books:

Partial List of People to Bleach (expanded 2013 paperback edition)
By Gary Lutz

Even as a chapbook, it was one of Time Out New York’s Ten Best Books of 2007, and now we’re proud to publish an expanded paperback edition of Partial List of People to Bleach, with six previously uncollected pieces, including the provocative and now-classic essay “The Sentence Is a Lonely Place,” and a foreword by Gordon Lish.

“Partial List of People to Bleach is at once cruelly honest, precisely painful, and beautifully rendered.” —Brian Evenson

“Gary Lutz is a master—living proof that, even in our cliché-ridden, denial-drenched, hype-driven age, true originality is still an American possibility.” —George Saunders

Get your copy here.

Check out 3:AM’s interview with Lutz, and a review of his last collection, Divorcer.

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Hugh Kenner Hits a Home Run

Wouldn’t it take an outsider to aptly critique the American scene, the American people, the American culture? Hugh Kenner, a Canadian, did this at the end of a section devoted to Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams in his book A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers. A book dedicated to Guy Davenport. A book on Donald Barthelme’s syllabus.

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Reading at Unnameable Books Sunday June 9th 7pm

family camp poster
Join us for the big night of prose and poems NYC has been dying for:
– Hosted by Greg Gerke
– Hot new poems from local favorites Ben Pease and Bianca Stone.
– For the diehards, Gabe Durham and Jack Christian have promised ZERO overlap in what they’re reading on their two nights in town.
– Mad prizes.
– Probably no prizes.    Unnameable Books
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Critics Who May Not Yet Exist

From 3am Magazine:

Hi. Susan Tomaselli is taking a well-earned sabbatical from 3:AM this summer, so I’ll be stepping in as co-editor in chief, focusing on non-fiction. I’ve been commissioning for 3:AM since 2011, so some of you will know me, and will have worked with me already. But I’d like to say that, right now, I’m open for speculative pitches and submissions, and will be reading them continuously. So get in touch. I’ll be especially pleased to hear from you if you have an idea for an essay, interview or book review related to one of the following three areas, which I’m keen to increase our coverage of:

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Letter to an Unknown Submitter

        Make it mew

Hello,

I am editing fiction for 3am Magazine this summer. Guidelines

A couple of things I would like to add:

Ezra Pound’s poem “Portrait D’ Une Femme” was “rejected by the North American Review in January 1912, according to Pound, on the grounds that ‘I had used the letter ‘r’ three times in the first line, and that it was very difficult to pronounce.'” *

Line: “Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,”

I don’t edit this way and frown upon those who do; in fact, the more difficult to pronounce, the better.

James Salter: “The secret of making [art] is simple. Discard everything that is good enough.”

I am not looking for toss-offs or something “good enough” for an internet journal. This is 3am Magazine, it’s been here for over thirteen years, that’s centuries in internet time.

If this is brusque, think of the process this way. Roughly 15% of all submissions (print, internet, and otherwise) never get replied to. I am replying to all because I take this seriously.

Here are two shorter stories that I was grateful to be an editor for:

Amber Sparks’s “May We Shed These Human Bodies”

Lance Olsen’s “Robert Smithson”

Best,

Greg Gerke

* Ezra Pound, New Selected Poems and Translations p.287

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Unnameable Books Reading 5/31/13 – 7pm

I’m happy to host the following writers at Unnameable Books on Friday, May 31st:
John Haskell is the author of a short-story collection, I Am Not Jackson Pollock (FSG, 2003), and the novels American Purgatorio (FSG, 2005) and Out of My Skin (FSG, 2009). Interview at Stop Smiling.
Robert Kloss is the author of The Alligators of Abraham, as well as the upcoming hybrid text The Desert Places, co-authored with Amber Sparks. His short fiction has been published in Crazyhorse, Gargoyle, Unsaid, and elsewhere. He can be found online at robert-kloss.com.

Gary Lutz is the author of Stories in the Worst Way, I Looked Alive, Partial List of People to Bleach, and Divorcer. Interview with David Winters.

Amber Sparks is the author of May We Shed These Human Bodies, released by Curbside Splendor in 2012, and the upcoming The Desert Places, co-authored with Robert Kloss. Her work has been widely published in print and online and you can find some of it at ambernoellesparks.com or follow her on Twitter @ambernoelle.
Ken Sparling  has written six novels. His latest is Intention, Implication, Wind from Pedlar Press. His first, Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall, published by Knopf in 1996 was recently reissued by Mud Luscious Press. Interview with Sean Lovelace.