By Jordan Blum, Holly Rae Garcia, and Ryan Prentice Garcia
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Ryan Prentice Garcia & Holly Rae Garcia
Holly Rae Garcia and Ryan Prentice Garcia are a sort of power couple in the creative writing world. They live on the Texas Coast and their new novella, The Easton Falls Massacre: Bigfoot’s Revenge, just came out on October 30th. Holly is a corporate photographer by day and the Editor-at-Large and Art Director at Versification Magazine. Some of her favorite authors include Edgar Allan Poe, Daniel Keyes, Richard Matheson, and Stephen King. Her debut novel, Come Join the Murder, was released this past March by Close To The Bone Publishing. Ryan works in construction and his most prized possession is a Kane Hodder autographed Jason Voorhees mask. He calls himself a “military brat” and he’s lived in Germany, Turkey, and Belgium.…
What I wouldn’t give for another morning like that one:
I brought you Kona coffee and sunny-side-up eggs, pausing momentarily at the bedroom door, teak tray perched on my fingertips, to watch you float on the rippling blue comforter, a still life, swimming a statuesque side-stroke. The birds in the branches outside our bedroom window capered about in the yellow-breasted sunlight. The maple tree, wrapped in wet brown bark, sprouted buds bejeweled by last night’s fog— the same little beads which slid down your naked skin in the shower, dawn after presumptive dawn.
I sip my coffee alone now, in the first anodyne rays of the mourning hours, measuring my life in birdsong–plaintive and palliative.
Despite being written and published decades apart, Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions and Shena McAuliffe’s The Good Echo bear similarities in how each novel breaks the fourth wall in order to engross the reader. While the novels also have differences in this approach (Vonnegut’s work utilizes drawings while McAuliffe’s novel utilizes a father’s dentistry notes where his story is told in his journal’s footnotes), the most notable similarity is that each novel utilizes a first-person narrator who at first seems disassociated from the story but slowly becomes more and more involved. In the case of Breakfast of Champions, the first-person narrator can be interpreted as the author; in The Good Echo, the first-person narrator is 12-year old Ben, the deceased son of Cliff and Frances Bell, who died from a botched root canal performed by his father.…
Seth Eisen died on Friday, January 18, 2018. Or he did not. There were several possibilities of what occurred that evening. Here is the first.
It was Julie’s fault and his own as well. He hadn’t cleared the evening with her first, so when she, a bestselling novelist with an almost unhealthy love of animals (she had provided hospice services to not one, but two pets in the last year and hired a pet psychic to find her lost cat), was busy, Seth was alone. His high hopes for a relationship to Julie had been dashed earlier anyhow; the long string of solipsistic text messages about her new agent; her belief that her religious sister-in-law’s prayers had caused her Netflix TV deal and a contract writing for Archie; the realization that the chaos surrounding her was not a bug but a feature.…
i. You find her in the summertime. She is down near the Gulf beyond the highway billboards that offer penitence to women with healthy wombs. She looks like a poppy field with ripped overalls and thin, Georgia hair and you imagine she will taste like the same cigarettes her mother died on. This is a place you’ll only find behind dancing eyelids, fasting on sleep and long-term memory.
ii. You find her later in the showers of early fall, when the harvest moon carries her over the Mason Dixon line. In a dream, you tattoo a promise you both made across your wrists and you decide you will live there. It is not the first or the last crossed-out promise you both will make together. You tell her you love her the same way Gulf waters love their tropical storms.…
In a recent interview, New York punk poet Eileen Myles calls for men to stop writing. “I think it would be a great time for men, basically, to go on vacation,” Myles says. “There isn’t enough work for everybody. Certainly in the arts, in all genres, I think that men should step away. I think men should stop writing books.”
Since the day in 1440 when Johannes Gutenberg popped the tab on a can of pilsner and congratulated himself for having invented the printing press, readers and writers and people who aren’t either have been telling us what we should or shouldn’t read. When one Caliph Omar was asked what was to be done with the library of Alexandria, he was reported to have said that, if the books in that library contained doctrine opposed to the Qur’an, they were bad and must be burned, whereas if those books supported the most important text of Islam, they should be burned anyway, for they are superfluous.…
