Steel Toe

Firstly, I apologize for not updating in more than a week. Most of what has been on my mind has been too personal for this particular vehicle. In any case, my transition is getting a little easier day by day, and I’m getting work done. I finished a new short story, and I’ve made daily progress on my new novel. Angela and I collaborated on a couple of new songs, and I’ve come up with some other song ideas that I still need to flesh out. Gigs are on the horizon, but nothing is concrete. Everything is in limbo.

I’ve been giving a lot more thought to my idea for a new literary arts magazine. I hope to start soon setting up a website and an infrastructure, though it may be a couple more months before I have the funding to get a unique URL and start really promoting it. I would like to start with mostly local support and then start branching outward. The tentative name for this project is Steel Toe Review. It will be mostly online, but I hope to do a print version as well, which may end up including a CD or DVD. The online version will have fiction and poetry, as well as multimedia content, collaborations between visual, literary, and sound artists. I’d like to take advantage of the unique resources that Birmingham has to offer, including the amazing improvisational music scene, young energetic writers and artists from various universities in the area, and the unique characters that have been around Birmingham forever and have not gotten their due recognition outside the area.

But I also want participation from all over, so I want to talk to all the best writers I know and have them talk to all the best writers they know to get submissions to get this thing off the ground. Once it starts, it can be a vehicle for staging readings and other performances locally, and it can be affiliated with my so-far theoretical creative writing workshop. I have resources to get the print edition into the hands of literary agents in New York and San Francisco, and of course the website itself can be promoted nationally or even internationally.