Ryan Werner (Writes Stuff): The Website
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Things that can happen, happen to you . . .

8/2/2014

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"Unreal Is Here" by Chavez, with a great Bon Jovi video/Mentos commercial
Another several months of terribly sporadic internet promotion. Here are some things.

1) I met some wrestlers (and Randy Couture) in Waterloo, Iowa, at a little Wrestling Hall of Fame between a strip club and a gas station with a Burger King built in. Diamond Dallas Page was a super awesome dude. The Steiner Brothers were kind of standoffish and weird. Jim Ross once again made it a point to prove that he didn't really want to be there.

1b) Wrestling fans are the best. Of the two dudes I was stuck between in line, one of them reads stuff on the internet but doesn't process it into actual thought ("Brock Lesnar's going to win at Summerslam. I read it online," followed by twenty similar comments) and a guy who thought wrestling was real and posed the question of whether or not Undertaker is in the Illuminati, which is also real.

1c) DDP is obviously in the Illuminati, as his hand symbol makes a triangle.

1d) In complaining about this guy to my friend Jim, he said that most people believe in angels and nobody's ever seen one, so if someone wants to believe in wrestling, at least everyone's fucking seen Stone Cold Steve Austin.

2) I'm mostly reading graphic novels and nothing else. Writing has been slow because all I want to do is sit down with Punisher MAX and play guitar because I'm fifteen.

3) I got a library card, finally. (So I can read comics for free.) I immediately cashed in on any goodwill I may have rallied up in the ten minutes I was a member by shitting in the women's restroom, something even the homeless dudes who mostly bathe there frown upon.

4) I thought I wasn't too old and frail to be front row at a hardcore show, but I was fucking wrong. Two songs in--this equals about 45 seconds--and someone landed on my head, sending my glasses directly underneath the feet of like 150 malnourished kids in black t-shirts.

4b) I got new glasses, which I will now use to watch hardcore bands from a comfy position off to the side of the stage along with the rest of the 30-year-olds who still want to be cool.

5) My girlfriend was in Reefer Madness. I watched most of it but my buddy Scotty showed up and started playing me videos of him doing trick basketball shots like halfway through.

6) I've gotten really into eating lots of chili dogs lately.

6b) "lately"

7) If the crowd who frequent the bar I work at is any indication, lots of people either don't really read books or there's a new thing people do where they explain to strangers how books work using James Patterson and Chuck Palahniuk as examples.

8) Got another email from an agent, which is awesome except for the fact that he essentially said, "If you have a novel, great! If you have a short story collection, write a novel."

9) I'm trying to downsize things and having a hard time, which means I packed up two giant boxes of books and still have five and a half bookshelves worth of stuff that I "can't possibly part with" even though I'm never going to read my copy of Ulysses and Thomas Pynchon books that I've read the first twenty pages of take up about a foot and a half of shelf space.
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Also, working with kids is awesome.
No publications since the last time that I can think of, though I just remembered that I need to send Austin Hayden of 90's Meg Ryan the audio file of me reading a story about karaoke.

I did do an interview with Jon Konrath over at Paragraph Line. Here's an excerpt:

PL: Who are your favorite three members of Krokus other than Chris Von Rohr, Fernando Von Arb, Marc Storace, Mark Kohler, and Mandy Meyer?

RW: They’re all drummers, actually. Freddy Steady, because he kind of sucked but really loved being in Krokus, which is admirable. (Sort of.) Steve Pace, because he played drums and his last name was Pace. Stefan Schwarzmann, because he’s like the foreign metal version of some asshole like Matt Sorum, who just plays in every band after their prime. He was on one of the Krokus albums in the mid-2000s, which he left Helloween to play on.


As you can tell, it's very insightful. Here's the whole thing.

Other than that I've been the least busy I've been in years. I mentioned in a previous blog post that my writing is slowing down and that I feel all right about it. I tried working my novella a bit this summer, the aforementioned Soft that is told in hundreds of shattered pieces and, so far, has had some mixed reactions from the people who have read what's done of it. I wrote an essay about a Drive-By Truckers song and never revised it. I wrote that story for Austin Hayden. I started some more stories about a guy named Marty and haven't finished them. And, like I said, I'm all right with that.

I've been playing guitar, writing songs for the three or four bands I've been ignoring while I do all this book/tour stuff. Finally getting back into comics has been great, too, especially since I've got some monthlies that have grabbed me, Saga and East of West. I've even been playing some shitty tower defense computer games just because I realized that I can.

I don't remember the last time I took a break from things--writing, working on publishing, booking a tour, doing stuff for Passenger Side, feeding my ulcer cream soda--for more than a week or two. I go back to my day job at the school in a few weeks, but until then, I've finally figured out how to relax. Talk all you want about the satisfaction of writing, but it's easy to forget that satisfaction and not the writing is the endgame.
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And I've been saving lots of pictures of wrestlers wearing fanny packs to my computer. Interests are weird.
I'll be doing a couple more readings this summer before packing it in and doing weekend warrior shit during the school year. Here are the last two dates:

8/6 - Champaign, IL - Institute 4 Creativity (w/Bob Bucko Jr & heavy metal belly dancers!)
8/7 - Rock Island, IL - Rozz-Tox QC (w/Bob Bucko Jr, Mystic Dolphin, KAB)


As for the readings I did this summer, they were all pretty awesome. Plenty of shit to talk, plenty of kind strangers. I made enough money to cover gas and a shitload of pinball, I never went hungry, and I had a place to crash every night. Everything else is a cherry on top. Let's do it again soon.

I'm going to rewatch all of The Larry Sanders Show now. Party time.

RW
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I'm not stoppin' til all my teeth are rotten . . .

12/25/2013

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"Coca Cola" by Pity Sex, from their debut EP Dark World. I'm working on a story about this song for WhiskeyPaper.

Has it really been four months already? Here's some shit.

1) The job I spoke about previously as being a possibility, barring background checks and whathaveyou, totally happened. Now I spend five days a week telling four-year-olds about wrestling and Ozzy.

1b) I acted like I only tolerated it at first, but it's really awesome. I wore an Anthrax shirt in my school pictures, because time won't change for me and vice-versa.

1c) My phone is a veritable cesspool of adorable pictures of kids helping me cook lunch. I'm worse than a grandmother.

2) I got the NUMBER ONE HIGH SCORE on the South Park pinball machine at the bar. Suck it, automated high scores that come pre-loaded onto the machine.

3) I've been watching a lot of wrestling. I realized there's a lot of stuff from right before the Attitude Era that I haven't seen all the way through. Here's to Survivor Series '96 and The Rock looking like a Ribbon Dancer tried to fuck a pineapple.

4) I started a band and joined another one, bringing the count to an unnecessary, over-committed FIVE BANDS.

4b) This is much less impressive when you consider that, much like other prolific songwriters--not that I'm really one of them--of previous and current times, I really only write three or four different kinds of songs. I just sort of change the nuances a bit to fit what I'm doing, because I'm a liar, essentially.

5) My friend Kylie and her friend Matt (who is kind of my friend, too, though I barely know him) made a documentary about me. It's just called Werner and it's about twelve minutes long, which is all it takes to sum up my life, including gag reel.

5b) It's actually a really well-made documentary, and Kylie and Matt did a great job. I was worried I'd look like I was too serious or too much of a joke, but she blended it well. Better than I do in my life, at least.

5c) It'll be available to watch online sometime in the near future once all the paperwork and red-tape of whatever goes along with these sorts of projects is cleared. They're film students and this was for a class, so I'm not sure exactly what needs to all happen. Other than CGI enhancements of my abs.

6) I saw Charles Bradley play a show in Madison and it was pretty incredible. I still need to see the documentary about him.

6b) I missed Lee Fields the month before, though. Only so much soul I can handle, apparently.

7) I downloaded Snapchat and don't understand it. Why wouldn't you just text someone? On the bright side, I wish all selfies had a built-in disappearing point.

8) My computer died. Just flat-out fucking ate shit. Luckily, I have most of my important stuff--music, wrestling, writing, porn--on an external hard drive. The stuff I deserve to get bummed about losing is some writing and pictures. Everything else was pirated. Even I'm not delusional enough to think I had a right to that.

8b) David Atkinson is a beautiful man with a heart of gold, and he hooked me up with a replacement right quick. Buy him cigarettes and coffee and build a statue of his out of a meat of your choice. Then feed it to a homeless person, because the world needs more people paying it forward.

9) I got a hat that says BOOB POLICE on it for Christmas. Happy birthday, Jesus.

10) I became an uncle. My brother and his girlfriend had a kid and named it Maddux, which is a cool name spelled in a fucking dickhead way.

10b) My brother spells his name "Nikolas" with no "c" in it, so whatever. Hereditary, I guess. I'm just glad I'm not "Ryen" or some shit.

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That's bad, right?

Writing-wise, I'm doing better than I was when I last checked in. I've written six stories since then and five of them have been picked up. The sixth one is a really bad retelling of a Kenny Loggins song about Winnie the Pooh that Matt Burnside suggested I write about for Cloud Rodeo, and I never submitted it because in addition to being mind-numbingly shitty, I lost it in the computer crash. If I need to find it, I'm sure it's in an e-mail or Facebook message, but I might just call this one a loss. (Sort of.)

Some of the stuff I wrote is already up. The surge in writing came from the Cease, Cows contest for Halloween. They had a 1000-word cap and a theme of "hallow/hallowed" that stories needed to fit into. One submission for $5, three submissions for $10. I wrote three stories and got an honorable mention with one. (And a Pushcart nomination!)

The winner of this batch according to Cease, Cows was the story "Atavism." I started writing this under the theme of "hollow" instead of "hallow" because I'm a goddamn idiot. I gave the woman empty bones and then, when I realized I was writing about the wrong word, just decided to keep that idea and work around it. So, a haunted house, some hollow bones, and the things people do when they're afraid.

Melanie thought that humans descended from birds. Back in the middle of her snap, she paid an old man strung out on heroin fifty bucks to read her past lives, to do a palm reading on the place where her hand was supposed to be but wasn’t. So he ran his finger down the scar that sealed the end of her arm up and then he told her that God created sparrows and some evolved into humans.

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The other new thing that went up already is the story "My Friend Wallace Eating a Candy Apple at the End of the World." I wrote this last for the contest, in a quick burst. It's the shortest thing I've written in a long while, maybe the shortest thing I've ever had published. As is the way with DOGZPLOT, it's under 200 words, so I'm not going to excerpt it. You've got time to click a link.

"My Friend Wallace Eating a Candy Apple at the End of the World"

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The non-story I got published recently is a review of my bro Dena Rash Guzman's debut poetry collection Life Cycle. It's a damn fine book made by a rough-neck that might also possibly be a red-neck. Part ghost and part glitter, part sweet and part bitter. (Not everyone gets the Macho Man Randy Savage-style intro, DRG.) Check it.

Guzman’s vision is true to itself, right down to the faults. This is proof that the book has been nurtured and then shot out, more creation than craft and goddamn all the better for it.

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I almost forgot that I had a story get published right after that last blog went up, the aforementioned "There Is No Joy between the Last Thing and the Next Thing" up at Jersey Devil Press. It's about friendship and trust and moving forward, always.

When they called on me to testify, I told them I didn’t know Eugene to have a history of violence. What I meant was that spent knuckles and a dozen years of broken glass don’t add up to bank statements or toe tags, but, there they are.

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You see, I used to have a bunch of rad photos saved to my computer and I'd just pop one in a spot like this as a little space break, something semi-related I could make a joke about. Thanks for nothing except leaving me with pictures of me being a fat fuck, computer crash.

The rest of the stories will be up in the months to come. "If There's Any Truth In a Northbound Train" was the second story written for the Cease, Cows contest and it'll be up at SmokeLong Quarterly in the spring. It's about twins and fate and what it means to be an older brother, if it means anything.

I also got solicited for a couple stories by Meg Tuite, one for the Sante Fe Literary Review and one for Connotation Press. SFLR will be publishing my story "Mexico," about sleep and reality and what happens when the amounts of each get thrown off together. Connotation nabbed up my story "Banzai Skydiving" about the difference between a lack of opportunity and a lack of skill. Both of these will be up fairly soon, if I understand it right.

The Indiana Review with my story "Shoot Out the Bright Lights" arrived in the mail the other day and it looks awesome. I've never been in a big journal like this, something with history and very slick production values.

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Also, I'm the first person to mention Krokus in the Indiana Review, as confirmed by the IR staff.

I can't really do a year-end book round-up because I didn't read shit this year. Or, to be more specific, I read a bunch of shit this year, but not a lot of it in book form. I spent a fair amount of time reading manuscripts for Passenger Side and reading stuff online trying to find stuff I loved to solicit for manuscripts, but as far as books go, I didn't have a lot of luck or time.

The two books I put out on PSB that weren't my book are my favorites. They had to be and have to be and are. Justin Lawrence Daugherty's Whatever Don't Drown Will Always Rise is brilliant, the biggest heart of the hardest warrior. Matthew Burnside's Infinity's Jukebox is really that: the tunes of a lifetime, every lifetime. (ORDER HERE!)

Aaron Teel's Shampoo Horns is my favorite book I had nothing to do with other than sitting down and reading it cover-to-cover. It's dirty and tender and says a lot about what it means to grow up with nothing more than yourself and the people around you.

I read Brian Allen Carr's Vampire Conditions, too, and really dug it. Blake Butler's Scorch Atlas did nothing for me. I didn't even finish it.

I don't know why I didn't read, other than time. I know my old job killed a lot of my creativity and ability to focus on creative endeavors. Maybe next year will be better. It kind of has to be, right?

I always forget that reading and writing go hand in hand, and in a year when I played a bunch of shows with a bunch of different bands and wrote a lot of music, some strange and some in the box, for several groups, I can name a list of a dozen killer records I spun over and over again. One feeds into the other, which doesn't make it less of a struggle to think of something to pull from the air, but it does make the air a bit thicker.

There's a stack of books I bought this year from a lot of great writers. Amber Sparks, Matt Bell, Jon Konrath, David Atkinson, Sam Snoek-Brown and on and on. I know they're all talented and enjoyable. This one's on me.

Hopefully I'll tune in sooner than every four months to this thing, but incase I don't, here are my new tour dates, reading in a city near you. (Maybe.) March 2014! NO COAST SPRING BREAK!

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Thursday, March 13: Rock Island, IL
Friday, March 14: St. Louis, MO
Saturday, March 15: Carbondale, IL
Sunday, March 16: Nashville, TN
Monday, March 17: Louisville, KY
Tuesday, March 18: Cincinnati, OH
Wednesday, March 19: Fort Wayne, IN
Thursday, March 20: Grand Rapids, MI
Friday, March 21: Chicago, IL
Saturday, March 22: Madison, WI

More info as it comes. Booking a DIY book tour without doing Universities and trying to avoid book stores and the (somewhat justified) 40% cut they take from sales is hard. I knew that going in, having booked the tour this previous summer, but I forgot how often writers don't leave their house and how many places don't have reading series. I've talked to a lot of cool, helpful people in booking this, but I've also hit a lot of odd, dead ends.

Regardless, I'll be in the car on March 13th and I'll be in these cities, doing my thing. Join me if you can.

Until then, party like you want it.

RW
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What you did to me on those long nights with short skirts . . .

8/20/2013

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"Jamie" by The Bismarck, from their new album "Wild Prairie Rose"

I guess it's been about three months. Lots of things have happened.

1) I quit my job as a janitor at Wal-Mart. It was really bumming me out because, in addition to the inherent shittiness of a title like "Wal-Mart Janitor," my boss was a dick, I was forced to do things that were blatantly not my job, and I didn't have time or patience to write or read anymore.

1b) To be fair, I spent the majority of my four years there sneaking off to a non-monitored office or the family restroom (which locks) and reading books. I still did some work occasionally, at least as much as they deserved for the shit pay and shit treatment, but that majority is barely a majority. Most of the fuck-around time took place in the first two-and-a-half years. After that it was Buttfuck City.

2) I went on a cross-country tour of the US with Justin Lawrence Daugherty. We did readings in ten different states over the course of two weeks, putting almost 4000 miles on his Toyota Corolla, also known as the Toyota Rock 'n' Rolla. A full recap of this will be up on the Sundog Lit blog soon.

3) I moved out of my parents' place.

3b) Again.

3c) It's not that I didn't like living at the farm, something I hadn't done in about eight or nine years, but the driving was killing me. And I hate my mom's cats and choice of television shows that she must blare on televisions in two separate rooms simultaneously. But yeah, I fell asleep at the wheel a couple times from the half hour drive back and forth on long, boring country roads and was spending so much money in gas each month that I could actually afford to rent an apartment in the city I was driving to and come out ahead on cash.

4) I went on a week-long tour of the Midwest filling in on guitar with the Oakland-based band Victory and Associates. I also did some sitting in with our tour-mates, Louisville-based riffers Trophy Wives. Playing a lot was rad, but even better than that, I met a bunch of cool, old school punk rock dudes who proved my theory that punk rock and having your shit together are not mutually exclusive.

4b) We played with a band in Minneapolis called Gay Witch Abortion.

4c) We also played the surprise 50th birthday party for Jeff Moody, one of the coolest dudes in music. He's the sort of guy who only wants to talk passionately and positively about the things he loves, and is worth listening to for those and several other reasons.

4d) Kentucky seems like an odd place.

5) I got a rollerdog grill. It's like the ones in the gas station but it has a bunch of gaudy plastic shit all over it to make it look old-timey.

6) My girlfriend moved in with me. We're currently arguing about who is more poorly dressed in an attempt to get out of answering the door, which has been being knocked on for a minute or two now.

7) Summerslam was great, I just wish Randy Orton wasn't the guy they're going with for this "Daniel Bryan is a B+" thing. He's fucking boring. I think the "R" in "RKO" stands for "resthold." And he looks like the wall of a tattoo shop threw up on his arms. He's six or seven years past his two or three year prime. The angle is good and it broke my heart in all the right ways, but Orton's a clowndick.

7b) If any of this results in the Evolution theme being used again, all is forgiven.

8) I got the number 4 score on the South Park pinball machine at the bar I work at. That means I'm fucking awesome.

9) Barring a background check and fingerprints and all the paperwork that needs to happen when you're going to work with kids, I might have an additional job as a cook at a Montessori school, because life is weird.

9b) I was going to just work at the bar and tighten up spending-wise and then just tour as much as I can, but this kind of seems like an opportunity I can't pass up. It's only thirty hours a week and I'll be done at 1:00 every day. That means I can still work at the bar and have time for band practice. Plus, with seasonal breaks and all the other times kids get off for essentially no reason, I'll be able to tour about as much as I would anyways. My only real sacrifice is having to hang out with kids all the time and make up lies out stuff that they will no doubt believe, because they are dumb.

10) Gwen Beatty got published. This is cool because she's a great writer and that aforementioned girlfriend and there's no better return on the good karma she's created by having to see me naked on a regular basis than by having her talents be recognized. You should read her story "I Thought About How the Sea" and then send her stories to read for her new gig at the journal Cease, Cows.

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Do you even be gross, bro?

In this time, I've done very little writing. Or reading. I've read manuscripts for PSB and done edits on other people's stuff, but I haven't done much of anything for my own work. This is called an "excuse" because I'm "lazy" and "currently mostly playing computer games."

The whole "write every day" thing is an idea I try to live by it. It seems to be the one piece of advice that almost everyone agrees upon. There a part in the Comedians of Comedy documentary where Patton Oswalt talks about being obsessed with doing stand-up, to the point where it was all he did for two or three years. Open mics, crafting jokes, listening to other people do it. He says that every serious artist probably goes through this at some point, just drowning themselves in their craft.

I did that already. I did that when I was 20 and 21 and 22 and 23. I stayed home on weekends and revise stuff. I spent my entire Spring Break when I was twenty writing for six or seven hours day. I wrote before work and after work and couldn't think of anything but narrative and character whenever I watched television or a movie.

This was to no immediate benefit to the outside world. I was working on a novel that I knew wouldn't get published, something uneven and very blatantly the first thing I'd ever written. The last page is infinitely better than the first page, because I learned everything I know about writing just by working on that one giant thing.

Then I fell into an easy sort of routine--Mark Doty said he only write 400 words a day, so that's what I did. I've even shortened it in the past year or so: 100 words a day and one perfect sentence. I usually end up doing more than that, but sometimes I don't, which is fine. The one rule of writing is "feel good." I figured out how to write--or at least how I write--and I do that and it's very satisfying, the ways I still manage to surprise myself, running with the same themes and motifs and building up a series of personal archetypes the way Bob Dylan or Jason Molina or Raymond Carver did.

That I do the same thing they did, on a smaller, less successful level, is still incredible to me.

But recently, I haven't done shit. I've been preoccupied with other endeavors, some creative and some not: bands and a micropress and Twin Peaks and making dinner and pinball and all that stuff. Even now that I've been working a mere twenty hours a week I've only been writing four or five days of it.

Back when I was neck deep in my writing, I couldn't go two days with getting panicky about not writing. I just went a few months without doing much of anything, and I feel all right.

I'm not sure what this has to do with anything other than I don't know if I'm becoming less self-obsessed or if I actually might not write forever. I don't like to think that I can be perfectly happy not doing something I spent so much time grinding my life around.

"There's too much fucking perspective now."

Still, I managed to write a few things during a brief explosion of productivity. One of the stories will be for a special issue of Jersey Devil Press. I get my old Our Band Could Be Your Lit project up and running again for ONE NIGHT ONLY, thanks to a suggestion of "write about a Lita Ford song if you can't think of anything" by Mike Sweeney. From that has come the story "There Is No Joy Between the Last Thing and the Next Thing." It's based on "Shot of Poison" from Lita's pretty-awesome album Dangerous Curves. It's about friendship and emptiness and the big, scary future. Look for it soon.

(Unfortunately, I missed Lita Ford when she came to the casino in town. I made a promise to my pubescent self that I would have sex with her, but bailed at the last minute because I didn't want to take off work and Lita kind of looks like old dinner rolls now.)

Another thing I wrote and managed to get published right away in a kind of silly "the internet is a wild place" sort of way is an essay called "How to make -$1377 the Hard Way" about starting a micropress, booking my own cross-country book tour, DIY attitudes in indie lit, jealousy, success, satisfaction, and other things I secretly and not-so-secretly obsess about when it comes to writing. The ever-badass Jennifer A. Howard picked it up immediately and pushed it through to publication right away for the Passages North WRITERS ON WRITING column. I'm very happy to be a part of it.

Punk rock means that not only do all the eggs go in the basket, but you decide what the eggs and the basket are. Anyone who understands this probably doesn't need the reminder and anyone who doesn't understand it probably isn't going to have a revelation concerning it, so I’ll stop being indignant before I get wet under the arms about it.

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Some other things I wrote awhile back that were published during my period of soul searching/watching Agent Dale Cooper eat pie include this story about brothers and pro wrestling and what the truth really is and what it's good for. It's called "A Comprehensive List of the Least Worst Way to do Everything" and it's up a Necessary Fiction.

I watch my dead brother’s wrestling matches and try to count the number of times he gets hurt for real. In one, a wispy tattooed man hits him with a monitor from the commentary desk. In the rematch, he hits him with the commentary desk.

I’ve got one of his boots on either side of the television. Maybe there’s a heart attack resting in my
chest, too.


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And this review of Ken Nash's The Brain Harvest, also up at Necessary Fiction.

What this really taught me was the same thing that The Brain Harvest by Ken Nash taught me: precision and compression and crazy hope, how if we zoom in far enough in anyone’s life, the absurdities reveal a depth of honesty and wonder. There’s something amazing in everyone’s life, something historic in everyone’s town.

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And, lastly, this review of Adam Marek's wonderful short story collection The Stone Thrower, up now at Heavy Feather Review.

Before even reading Adam Marek’s short story collection The Stone Thrower­—a book that openly states its themes of parental protection and vulnerability right on the back cover—I began to worry that I would be slogging through a dozen or so stories written by someone who has been made soft and sentimental by the idea of what they do to nurture their offspring or, perhaps even worse, stories written by someone who has been made hard, writing for the aforementioned softies.

Thankfully, The Stone Thrower is none of that.


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Most of any tour is a variation on this picture of an unclean Justin Lawrence Daugherty devouring a burrito with gravy in it at a truck stop somewhere in northern Idaho at 8:00 AM shortly before describing some guy's balls as smelling like nuclear fallout.

A very nice review of my chapbook, Murmuration, went up at Heavy Feather Review. Austin Hayden was too kind.

Ryan works life’s incongruities. The Midwest he puts on the page is at once vast and closed-off. Even (at times, especially) alongside his friends, or girlfriends, or family members, his speaker is alone out there. His POV character is calloused but endearing. Both sarcastic and earnest. The yin and yang of Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld meshed into one voice.

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And, actually, now that I think about it, a killer review of Justin Lawrence Daugherty's Whatever Don't Drown Will Always Rise went up at HFR a bit before mine, thanks to the wonderful Kate Kimball.


There is a bridge that dogs jump to their deaths from that symbolizes the broken heart of a man. A man swearing there is a bomb on the lawn, which later, the character who believes him tries to pry the metal from the earth. A teenager works on competitive eating to impress a father who is a Marlboro Man in Japan. Whatever Don’t Drown Will Always Rise introduces unexpected situations, but is able to create a strong affect in those situations. Daugherty’s characters are believable, endearing, and refreshing. His use of ironic humor, believable dialects, and uncanny conflicts work to symbolize the innate human quest for rediscovering nature.

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And while I'm on the subject of all thing Passenger Side Books, Matthew Burnside's Infinity's Jukebox has a birthday and artwork! September 9th, people. Here's one of the covers we'll be using in addition to seven other killer color schemes.
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Order all of this stuff right here at the cheaply-made PASSENGER SIDE BOOKS website.

After that Passages North essay went up, I got a lot of traffic to this site, and most of the information on it was from months ago. I'm going to try to not make it that long between updates. If you're new here now, take a look around. I'm doing things, occasionally. I hope you are, too.

With love,

RW
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Criminal, there ought to be a whole lot more . . .

2/6/2013

0 Comments

 
"If You Want Blood" by Mark Kozelek, because who the fuck knew there'd be so much pathos hidden right there in an AC/DC song?

It's been about a month. Here are some things that have happened since then.

1) I watched Summerslam 2005 and didn't cry when the giant electronic American flag unfurled behind Hulk Hogan during his entrance. This is a semi-major life-improvement.

2) I applied for a job stocking ice and beer at a casino. I didn't get it. Two weeks later they called me and asked if I want to work part-time checking coats.

2b) I told them to fuck off.

2c) What I actually did was just not call them back after they left a voicemail.

3) I searched for "Iowa" and "Wisconsin" on PornHub. There were a bunch of videos for Iowa and all the chicks looked pretty hot. There were like seven videos for Wisconsin and all the chicks looked like they were made of stale biscuits.

4) Several dumb old photos of me were uploaded to Facebook by other people, such as this one where I'm wearing an XL Pantera shirt and standing next to a cardboard cutout of Shaquille O'Neal and this one where I'm wearing a winged battle-suit I made out of Construx.

5) I locked my keys in my car twice, once behind the coffee shop and once a week later in front of the coffee shop. The same guy from Master Key came to my assistance both time. The first time he was wearing a pink mesh shirt underneath a button-up tank top and when he went into his trunk to get the tools he needed to get into my car, he had to first take out two huge chainsaws and set them on the ground.

6) I got ordained. I'm going to marry so many drunk people at the bar.


7) I met Mick Foley.

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I MET MICK FOLEY, DUDE.

I had some stuff get published recently. It seems like I used to be stoked for weeks after something got published and now I've had three things go up this past month and I'm already back to feeling like I haven't done anything. Writing is better than meth, but only because it doesn't ruin your teeth.

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In a rare showing, I was able to write and publish an essay. It's about Neko Case, and though everything I do is, on some level, about Neko Case, this is blatantly about Neko Case and how her album Middle Cyclone made me learn things about living in and around solitude, the extent to which I should love myself, and respecting fear as it arrives in all humans. It's up over at The Rumpus, and I'd love for you to read it.

"The year 2008 tumbled out of itself and took with it the things that consumed my days. Within a month I had lost my job to the upholding of liquor laws, my college education to an unavoidable graduation, and my girlfriend to youth and general apathy.


I spent a lot of time in bed, not depressed, but reading depressing things—Seamus Heaney’s Selected Poems 1966-1987, William Matthews’s Search Party, Rick Bass’s In the Loyal Mountains—often out loud. I read Heaney in an impassioned Irish accent, Bass with a gruff-yet-kind tone of wonderment. I read Matthews sitting up, as if at a podium, addressing a faceless sum of the discontinued millions.

There were certain lengths I was willing to go to in order to not be myself."

----------

I also had a story called "Trace" that I've talked about here before on the subject of "revising old stuff I wrote and wondering if it's all just a big waste of my fucking time." This one turned out decent for being around so long and going through so many drafts. It's up over at 10,000 Tons of Black Ink, and it'd be really great of you to read it.

"My grandmother spent her last several thousand mornings highlighting the obituaries."

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Lastly, the fourth story in my chapbook/cycle Murmuration is out there in the world now. I'm happy with how this one turned out and, like most of my stuff, it ties in with another story: The Honeybreakers are the band that had dissolved and reassembled in my story "Sometimes We Were Young." Here we find them merely dissolving, as seen through the eyes of our faithful narrator. Please read it over at Bartleby Snopes.

"Revising my dreams into the necessary shapes involved going out to the van every night and playing guitar in the street. I waited until after the show, after everyone had locked into the distractions that would take them through to morning. I would strap on whichever guitar I grabbed first and commence to shredding first against the van and then eventually to the center of the street. This was a small reassurance that my life would eventually resolve itself if attacked from compromising angles."

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The chance of me or my buddy Josh actually learning German: 0%

I've spent so much time playing music that I haven't really had time to sit down and write anything. This isn't really a very good excuse. "Write every day" is kind of the only semi-infallible writing advice out there, and I'm totally blowing it. If this new country-rock project gets off the ground, I'll be in a total four bands in addition to working 40+ hours between two jobs. My options in life turned out to be "one band that does a lot" or "four bands that don't do much." Regardless, none of these bands are getting me laid, so it doesn't really matter.

I'm also going on a micro-tour with the Oakland-based rock & roll band Victory and Associates as a hired gun to replace their real lead guitarist who can't make it because he has a real job, unlike us. My band Legal Fingers played with them back in October and we hit it off and I've been on their podcast not once, but twice, and now we're going to christen our union by piling into a van and making it smell bad for about a week. I've spent the last month learning how to play a dozen or so of their songs and in less than a week I've got to prove that I won't fuck it up. For those not in the know, this is what volume was invented for.

Well, and this.

But still, I haven't had time to write anything because when I'm not at a band practice I'm making a flier for a show or I'm being a fucking dickhead on Twitter or I'm watching The Family Feud at the coffee shop. Murmuration has been done for months now, which means I've been slacking on finishing the wrestling-themed chapbook. One story called "A Comprehensive List of the Least Worst Way To Do Everything" is done and making the rejection rounds, but "Waiting for Andre"--the story about a rich man with a bone disease who learns about and becomes obsessed with the anecdote of Samuel Beckett giving Andre the Giant rides to school--is stuck in revision hell. I've just finally got a decent grip on it after weeks of picking at it here and there, but it's still not close. The title story, "The Road Becomes What You Leave," exists only in the form of an aborted story from years ago. If I finish this book before the end of the year, I'd be surprised.

And I'm working on a novella, but the truth is that I'm not working on it nearly as hard as I'm working on my tweets, which is fucked up.

I hope I have something to show the next time I check in, but I'll probably just have more stories about how drunk girls in bars yell at me and then later on get my phone number and pretend to be Stoya. Mario Kolaric is doing the artwork for my chapbook and Matt Kish is doing the artwork for Justin Lawrence Daugherty's chapbook that I'm putting out through Passenger Side Books. So there's that. But still, I can't take credit for that. All I did was send some e-mails. I did that to Christina Hendricks and NOTHING.

That's it for now. Be wonderful.

RW
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    Ryan Werner
    (About Stuff)
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    Writer, rocker, janitor. Lover of pro wrestling, porno, and ice cream. Hater of fingerless gloves, pictures of cats, and goodbyes. 

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