By Jordan Blum, Holly Rae Garcia, and Ryan Prentice Garcia
Posted on
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.…
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.…
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.…
As a student in the Sierra Nevada University MFA program, I recently got to sit down with Suzanne Roberts to discuss her latest book, the memoir Bad Tourist (University of Nebraska Press, 2020). Beyond being a writing instructor, Roberts is an accomplished travel writer, named “The Next Great Travel Writer” by National GeographicTraveler Magazine. Her previous book Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail (Bison Books, 2012) won the 2012 National Outdoor Book Award. Roberts has also published four volumes of poetry.
Even though I have had classes with Roberts and have attended literary events where she was in attendance, until I read Bad Tourist, I can’t really say that I knew her. To be honest, she intimidated me: she is a demanding instructor, and while friendly, she is unabashedly forthright.…
David Colodney is the author of the chapbook Mimeograph (Finishing Line Press, 2019). A two-time Pushcart nominee, his poems have appeared in South Carolina Review, Panoply, Gyroscope Review, and The Chaffin Journal. David holds an MFA from Converse College, and lives in Boynton Beach, Florida, where he serves as Associate Editor of South Florida Poetry Journal.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with Colodney about Mimeograph, how father/son relationships impact us in general, his upcoming poem (“Turnstiles”), music, and much more!
As a registered caffeine addict, I’m more than a little bewildered by anyone over the age of twelve who doesn’t drink coffee. I’m with Michael Pollan, whose recent audiobook, Caffeine, explores not only how the world’s most widely used psychoactive drug has taken over our lives but also tells how he tested his own reliance on caffeine by giving it up for three months. Pollan slept better, he says, but his brain power flagged and his productivity declined, so he went back to the stuff.
As for myself, well, I’m glad that somewhere around the year 850, an Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi noticed that when his charges nibbled the berries of a certain plant, they gave up the foxtrot, waltz, and mambo forever and began to do the twist, frug, swim, hitchhike, monkey, slop, Watusi, pony, shake, jerk, stomp, shag, and mashed potatoes.…
Beate Sigriddaughter, author of hundreds of poems, is the winner of the 2014 Jack Grapes Prize and a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee. She has promoted women’s writing at her blog, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, for many years, an activity which grew out of her earlier Glass Woman Prize. Siggriddaughter is the author of Emily(review below) and Dancing in Santa Fe and Other Poems. Her forthcoming Dona Nobis Pacem will be issued in December 2021 by Unsolicited Press.
Emily, in your latest collection, you assume a unique voice, so different from the personas you presented in Dancing in Santa Fe. Can you tell us a little about how Emily originated? Did the collection fall together, for example, over a period of months, or years?…
