You’re going to hear a lot from me about Steel Toe Review over the next couple of months.
On Monday, we’ll be launching a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for our first year anthology. More on that in a couple of days.
Also on Monday, we’ll start posting issue #10.
And finally, I’m trying out a mailing list service for STR subscribers. Up until now, I’ve just been managing the list manually, which is a huge pain. If you aren’t already on the list, sign up.
Exciting times.
Ghost Herd is playing twice in January, both times in the same week.
On Tuesday, January 17, we are playing the Radio Free Birmingham series at Bottletree. For this, we’ll be doing a shorter set with three other bands (tba). There is no cover charge.
On Friday, January 20, we are playing at Das Has with our sister band Results of Adults. The cover is $5. RoA will go on at 9. We will go on at about 10 or 10:30 and play a long set. Here is the Facebook event.
I think perhaps the hardest thing about writing is to get into and stay in the right frame of mind for writing for an extended period. I can’t be too relaxed or too amped. If I’m tired, like when I first wake up, I can’t think at all. Have to have some coffee. But too much coffee, and my mind is all over the place. Some exercise sometimes helps clear the head sometimes, but I can also use it as a distraction so the only thoughts entering my head are about how many calories I’m burning and not about the story I’m working on. Anything can be a distraction. Staring at a computer screen rarely helps, and often is also a distraction. Sometimes, I have to print out what I’m working on and take to it with a pen. Or I just grab a notebook and get some thoughts down that way.
For a lot of writers, the ritual is very important–sitting down at a certain time every day with things arranged just so, distractions put to the side. My schedule seems to be too unpredictable to ever settle down into such a routine. Between paid work, grad school, the Birmingham Free Press, Steel Toe Review, Ghost Herd, and a relationship, my to-do list is a constantly shifting jigsaw puzzle. One might suggest dropping one or two of these activities to create more time, but they are all intertwined like a pit of anacondas in heat. Each project supports the others in some way or another, either financially or by facilitating connections with other creative people that can help me or inspire me. Also, if I can’t seem to finish that short story, maybe I can write an exposé about the Shepherd Bend coal mine, and at least then I’ve written something that day.
I’ve been known to go on long walks, sometimes for an entire day, with just a notebook and a pen, circling through sentences in my head, occasionally sitting down somewhere to scribble out my notes. Then I’ll come home and type everything up later, editing as I go. This is, in fact, my preferred way to work, but often, the weather, or my non-literary responsibilities, prevent me from going on these expeditions. It’s rare that I have a day, or even a couple of hours, that I can spend that way.
I’m trying to flesh out a short story right now, but I’m writing this blog post instead. Sometimes, I have to work on two things at once. Write a couple of sentences on one topic and then go back to the other project, because I can’t stop my brain from jumping around from one to the other anyway.
So I don’t know what to do exactly to improve this situation. It will definitely be one of my goals in 2012 to be more organized about this process. It’s also one of my goals to do more walking.
I’m playing a benefit show tomorrow (Sunday) afternoon at Bottletree. The proceeds go to Desert Island Supply Co., an organization that provides creative writing workshops and writing tutors for kids in Birmingham. I have been a volunteer with DISCO since I moved back to town last year.
The idea of the show is that all the bands are to pick 4 songs to play that they couldn’t live without if they were stranded on a desert island.
Here is a really nice write-up from Birmingham Box Set. I still haven’t decided on all four of my songs.
Tickets are $20 in advance and $25 at the door. It starts at 2pm and goes on until midnight. I play at 4:30 pm.
Come spend the afternoon and evening stranded at Bottletree tomorrow. What songs would you want to hear?
All tracks recorded at Wild Honey Studios in Roebuck Springs, Alabama.
Click to listen. Right click to download.
I feel like I haven’t stopped moving since I got back to Birmingham. The mantra leading up to the show seems to have been “is this really happening?” The mantra after has clearly been “did this really happen?” Even as I write this, I find myself multitasking. I have to take a breath here so I can wrap my head around the whole thing.
I guess it happened. I’ve seen video evidence. But even watching it, it’s feels so distant and I barely even recognize myself.
So, for the uninitiated, let me back up a little bit. PopCanon was a band I was in just after college in the mid to late 1990s, when I was living in Gainesville, FL. The band recorded four CDs, toured the East Coast, and played hundreds of shows. It was the most ambitious and the most successful of any project I’ve been a part of (so far). We played our last show in April 2001. We played a reunion show a year after that. We haven’t played together since, until last weekend, the result of a Facebook comment thread that basically got out of hand.
Squeaky was/is the band we were most closely associated with. The two bands played dozens, perhaps more than a hundred, shows together. Squeaky was a straight up rocking and aggressive as PopCanon was goofy and bouncy, but we shared a love of dissonant guitar chords and nerdy references. The two bands were always so closely intertwined, you couldn’t separate us. Seeing Squeaky reformed (even with a new extra band member) would have been reason enough for me to drive to Florida for a weekend. They are my favorite band, still.
So… the weekend. Thursday night, basically all day Friday, and Saturday morning, we rehearsed. Everything more or less meshed right away, not just the music, but being around each other again. The energy of those six personalities bouncing off each other refused to dissipate. Right away, we started doing what we always do–making things more complicated, coming up with more ambitious arrangements and plans, and adding songs to the set list (which we continued to do right up to the moment we took the stage Saturday night).
Every PopCanon song is like a six-way tennis match where we are all trying to outwit each other and challenging the other ones to keep up, and somehow that works. It’s a game we play with each other, and it doesn’t matter if anybody is watching or listening. On Saturday, a hundred or so people came out to see this happen. It was a modest crowd by some measures, but honestly, it was probably about the same as we would have drawn ten years ago at one of our better shows. We would have done the same show whether anybody was there or not.
Being there again… It was truly like we’d never left it. To see Squeaky again, to play with PopCanon again, to talk to our friends and fans after ten years away. Pure joy. The purest.
We’ve all said it. If it was feasible, we would do it again next week. If we didn’t live in six cities, spread across 2,000 miles, if we didn’t have families and non-music careers to which we must attend, we’d buy another bordello red van and drive it around the country again. The musicians I worked with in PopCanon are the best I’ve ever worked with. It is my privilege just to be associated with them.
My short story, “The Jigsaw Puzzle” is featured in the latest issue of the refereed e-journal the Criterion.
Thanks so much to Melissa Studdard for suggesting I submit it there. The title of the story reflects one aspect of the plot but also the process of writing it. I had written several sections of this piece separately as scattered random notes and story ideas. I suppose this process is not unusual for writers, and I’ve certainly used it to some extent often. But in this case, that was all I had, and I was surprised at how smoothly it all came together.
Hope you enjoy it.
The direct link to my story is http://www.the-criterion.com/V2/n3/David.pdf.
Yesterday, we lost two major figures of recent American history, Steve Jobs and Fred Shuttlesworth.
The news spread quickly, in Birmingham at least, about Shuttlesworth. For several hours, my Facebook feed was chock full of remembrances and eulogies. They were discussing it on NPR all afternoon too. Shuttlesworth was a true American hero. Kyle Whitmire said on the radio, and I agree with him, that from a global perspective, the Civil Rights movement is probably the most important thing to come out of the United States ever. It happened in the United States, largely, because of events in Birmingham. It happened in Birmingham because of Fred Shuttlesworth.
Sometime in the evening, Steve Jobs passed. The news eclipsed the news about Shuttlesworth, naturally. In recent years, Jobs has certainly been in the news a lot more. Most people have heard of Steve Jobs even if they haven’t heard of Fred Shuttlesworth. There’s no denying that Jobs was probably the Thomas Edison of our time. His impact on the technology industry has been no less than revolutionary. He changed the way we live.
Still, there is something about the coincidence of these two losses happening so close together that bothers me greatly. I don’t want to try to equate the two. I never met Fred Shuttlesworth, and I’m not what you’d call an “Apple fanboy.” So neither of these losses are especially personal to me, but I feel the impact of both deeply. I think the thing is this: I’m a little bit in denial about Steve Jobs until I’ve had some more time to absorb the first loss. If Steve Jobs was the Thomas Edison of our time, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that Reverend Shuttlesworth was something like the Moses.
I suppose I just feel compelled to remind everybody, just not forget that we lost more than one revolutionary this week.
For October’s issue of Steel Toe Review, we haven’t gone out of our way to be Halloween-scary, though things sometimes just turn out that way.
In New York hordes of protesters continue to occupy Wall Street, and my own mind, recently re-immersed in Academia, is occupied with a search for some overarching narrative I can apply to everything that’s floating around in the zeitgeist. From here in Birmingham it feels like maybe something important is happening but we aren’t quite sure what it is yet, if we’re for it, against it, or indifferent to it. Though there is apparently a local group supporting the occupy movement, I still personally feel mostly disconnected from what’s happening. It’s easy to write it off as a group of people making the statement, “We are making a statement.”
I know there’s real substance to the feeling of oppression feeding the political movement, and at the same time, I suspect there are members of the movement that aren’t as oppressed as maybe they’d like to think they are. The feeling of disconnectedness that informs this dissonance is why I started Steel Toe Review in the first place. Birmingham is extremely disconnected from the literary and artistic community at large, and I hoped to enact some change there. The literary and the political are often intertwined, though (ideally) that connection is seldom overt. The piles of academic reading related to my graduate studies remind me that power structures are inherent in every aspect of life, and that the actions of everyday life, including reading and writing literature, are no less than tactics for navigating our way through the power structures that, by their nature, prevent us from ever being truly free.
Is that scary enough for you?
-M. David Hornbuckle, editor
Tym and I just mixed these down last night. They aren’t 100% final, but they’re close. More to come next week.
M. David Hornbuckle 