Current location:	The Nerve Center (aka my office)
Current mood:	bouncy
Current music:	"Dark Night" by The Blasters
Entry tags:	shout outs

Three Shout Outs and a Dagger of Despair . . .

SGJ hobnobs with the literary elite on Halloween at the TX Book Festival.

In the right hand column here at FL&P are links to other blogs/sites of note. I've updated this today to reflect three new links that I must offer all praise and shout outs to: S4D (Students for Dialogue), Demon Theory, and Michelle's Spell.

Students for Dialogue (S4D) is site for the student group my beloved wife Mel(ody) sponsors at the community college she adjuncts history at. Currently they are having a film series where they show immoderately inflammatory films that attempt to gouge the eyes of the local powers that be. (That is, Baptists/Republicans/Capitalists.) The first in the series was Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers followed by The God Who Wasn't There and in January they will be presenting Kilowatt Ours along with a panel discussion consisting of a TXU representative and some environmental types. Although I sometimes feel she is working real hard to keep the school from wanting her around, the reality is that she's ramrodded this student group into something cool and topically relevant so all props to her.

Demon Theory links to the site of Stephen Graham Jones, a well-published author who teaches up at Texas Tech in Lubbock. He and I were in grad school together for a while studying creative writing and he is the epitome of a real writer--that is, he's always writing his ass off--as opposed to folks like me and my cohorts in the program who talked--what we thought, at least--was good game about writing and the writing life but who were too busy mean mouthing folks and trying to recover from hangovers to actually be bothered with the act of writing itself. He did sell me a moderately decent couch for $20 that I carted around with me forever before finally losing it in some move somewhere. The picture is of him amongst all kinds of writing mucketymucks at, I think, the Texas Book Festival on Halloween in Austin this year. Stephen is the guy in the middle of photo with long dark hair wearing the Western-style shirt with roses on it. The guy in the lower left hand corner is, I believe, Jay McInerny, author of Bright Lights, Big City, and a direct line, as one of his students, to Ray Carver when he was part of the creative writing program up at Syracuse. All hail to Stephen: he's worked smart and hard to get where he is, where he wanted to be, where we wall wanted to be, and my warm feelings for his success are tempered by my own twinges of jealously/self-awareness about my own lack of ability to get where he finds himself today.  

Finally, I came across the blog, Michelle's Spell, of another old grad school buddy Michelle Brooks last week. Unlike me, she made it out of the program with her doctorate and is up in Detroit teaching English and, like Stephen, just write write writing. She and I were in the first creative writing class I took in grad school. It was a night class and after meeting some of the other students in the class we would go across the street to drink beer at the Flying Tomato after class. Then we started meeting before class for a few beers. Then, because it was a three-hour night class we started going over for a beer during the break. Then we started bringing back quarts of beer in big plastic Budweiser cups to drink during the last half of class. Michelle, I must emphasize, was never part of these shenanigans and, at the time I couldn't figure our her problem, she seemed to look down at us like we weren't serious about what we were doing/contributing to the writing life. Or something. Her blog has much to do with being a writer and is full of personal reflections plus thoughts on drinking: what to drink when while watching/doing what. Plus spells. Read. Mull over. Enjoy.