Podcasts about civil coping mechanisms

Brandi Wells is the author of the debut novel The Cleaner, available from Hanover Square Press. Wells' other books include the novella This Boring Apocalypse, published by Civil Coping Mechanisms (2015) and a full length chapbook of stories, Please Don't Be Upset, published by Tiny Hardcore Press (2011). Their fiction appears in Puerto Del Sol, Mid-American Review, Tri-Quarterly and many other journals. Wells earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alabama, as well as a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California. They're currently an Assistant Professor of creative writing at CSU Fullerton. *** Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, etc. Subscribe to Brad Listi's email newsletter. Support the show on Patreon Merch Twitter Instagram  TikTok Bluesky Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In A Single Bound was published as part of the short story collection So Different Now, which was released by CCLaP in 2011. The collection represents Part Two of the linked short story collection UPSTATE re-released in 2020 by Tortoise Books (and originally released under the title The New York Stories by CCLaP in 2015). In A Single Bound is read by Seth Berg (BIO below). INTRO/OUTRO music is Drinking of Me and was generously provided by Monkey Wrench. READER BIO Seth Berg is a hatchet-wielding forest-dweller who digs tasty hallucinatory literature. A hot-sauce-addicted pyromaniac with an MFA from Bowling Green State University, Berg fantasizes about flight without mechanisms, alien glyph systems, and snowshoeing through your nocturnal dreamscapes. He is a professor, poet, artifact-maker, and amateur astrophysicist whose mathematically coded collections of poetry will haunt, invigorate, provoke, and inspire you. Berg's first book, Muted Lines From Someone Else's Memory won the Dark Sky Books 2009 book contest. His second book, Aviary, co-authored with Bradford K. Wolfenden II, won the 2015 Artistically Declined Twin Antlers Contest, and was released by Civil Coping Mechanisms in January of 2017. Other poems and short fiction can be found in Connecticut Review, 13th Warrior Review, Spittoon Literary Review, BlazeVOX, Heavy Feather Literary Review, The Montucky Review, Masque & Spectacle, and Lake Effect, among others. Recently, poems were anthologized in GTCPR Volume III and Daddy Cool. He lives in Minnesota with his two supernatural children, Oak and Sage, and his magical better half, Kori. He loves your face. YEE-HAW, Cletus!!! https://www.tanzerben.com/blog/upstate-the-podcast

In this week's episode of the Get Lit Minute, your weekly poetry podcast, we spotlight the life and work of poet, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza. Her work has been featured in Poetry, Denver Quarterly, American Poetry Review, Poem-a-Day, Lambda Literary, PEN America, The Offing, and elsewhere. Her full-length collection THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS was published by Civil Coping Mechanisms in 2016. Source This episode includes a reading of her poem, “A Guide to Reading Trans Literature”. See more of her work in our Get Lit Anthology.“A Guide to Reading Trans Literature”We're dying and we're really sad.We keep dying because trans womenare supposed to die.This is sad.I don't have the words for my bodyso I'll say I'm a cloudor a mountainor something pretty that people enjoyso if I diepeople will be like “Oh, that's sad”.Be sad about that.It's okay to be sad.It is sad when people die.It is sad when people want to die.I sometimes want to die but I don't!I'm one of the lucky ones.You can feel happy about that.It's okay to feel happy about that.Now pretend this is very serious:History doesn't exist.My body doesn't exist.There's nothing left for you to be complicit in.It's okay for you to feel happy about that.Now pretend I am cryingright in front of you,opening that wound up just for you.Now pretend you can feel my pain.Now pretend something in youhas been moved, has been transformed.Now pretend you are absolved.Support the show

Janice Lee is the author of the novel Imagine a Death, available from Texas Review Press.   Lee is a Korean-American writer, editor, publisher, and shamanic healer. Author of seven books of fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry, she is the founder & executive editor of Entropy, Co-Publisher at Civil Coping Mechanisms, Contributing Editor at Fanzine, and Co-Founder of The Accomplices LLC. She currently lives in Portland, OR where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University. *** Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. Launched in 2011. Books. Literature. Writing. Publishing. Authors. Screenwriters. Etc. Support the show on Patreon Merch www.otherppl.com @otherppl Instagram  YouTube Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael talks with Michael Seidlinger about his path to writing, a love of horror, video games, his former press Civil Coping Mechanisms, his new book RUNAWAYS (Future Tense Books), the bonkers and broken system of publishing, falling back on a love of writing, processes based on the book, and more.Michael Seidlinger is a Filipino American author of My Pet Serial Killer, Dreams of Being, The Fun We've Had, and many other books. His newest, Runaways, is out now from Future Tense Books. You can find him online on Facebook, Twitter (@mjseidlinger), and Instagram (@michaelseidlinger).Podcast theme: DJ Garlik & Bertholet's "Special Sause" used with permission from Bertholet.

https://www.tamupress.com/book/9781680032550/imagine-a-death/ In the face of a slow but impending apocalypse, what binds three seemingly divergent lives (a writer, a photographer, an old man), isn't the commonality of a perceived future death, but the layered and complex fabric of how loss, abuse, trauma, and death have shaped their pasts, and how these pasts continue to haunt their present moments, a moment in which time seems to be running out. JANICE LEE is a Korean-American writer, editor, publisher, and shamanic healer. She is the author of seven books of fiction, creative nonfiction & poetry. She is Founder & Executive Editor of Entropy, Co-Publisher at Civil Coping Mechanisms, Contributing Editor at Fanzine, and Co-Founder of The Accomplices LLC. She currently lives in Portland, OR where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University.

A few nights ago, I interviewed the brilliant Shy Watson. She is the author of Horror Vacui from House of Vlad press and Cheap Yellow from Civil Coping Mechanisms. Shy is also the co-founder Blush Lit. Her work has appeared in New York Tyrant and Hobart and many other places. I read Horror Vacui and loved it for a lot of reasons. If I had to choose some, it would be because it’s hilarious, and dirty, and beautiful, and sad, and happy, and extremely cathartic. It’s separated into sections: poems, then some microfiction, then Quarantine diaries, which bring the entire thing together quite perfectly and in a way that I’ll never forget. Gave me the chills. Follow shy on twitter @formermissNJ. Hope you enjoy our talk. If you do, or do not, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or message me on twitter @selectedprose. Always love hearing from you. Be good.

This week's episode of the Animal Riot Podcast invites Tobias "Toby" Carroll (author of the Transitory from Civil Coping Mechanisms, Reel from Rare Bird Books, and the forthcoming Political Sign, a work of nonfiction for the Object Lessons series of books). Tobias is a writer to be jealous of, having made his way with freelance work as the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn and writer for the Watchlist column for Words Without Borders. Join us for a deep dive into translations and other work and Brian struggling to call Words Without Borders everything but that.  The transcript for this episode can be found on our website.

Juliet Escoriais the guest. Her debut novel, Juliet the Maniac, is available from Melville House. It was the official May pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club. This is Juliet's second time on the program. She first appeared in Episode 273 on April 30, 2014. She also wrote the short story collection Black Cloud, which was originally published in 2014 by Civil Coping Mechanisms. In 2015, Emily Books published the ebook, Maro Verlag published a German translation, and Los Libros de la Mujer Rota published a Spanish translation. Witch Hunt, a collection of poems, was published by Lazy Fascist Press in 2016.  She was born in Australia, raised in San Diego, and currently lives in West Virginia. In today's monologue, I respond to more listener mail.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Janice Lee talks about her secret dance performances and how the music of "Godspeed You! Black Emperor" carries her through writing sessions. Lee is the author of KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011), Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), Reconsolidation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2015), and The Sky Isn't Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016). She is Founder & Executive Editor of Entropy, Co-Publisher at Civil Coping Mechanisms, Contributing Editor at Fanzine, and Co-Founder of The Accomplices LLC. After living for over 30 years in California, she recently moved from Los Angeles to Portland, Oregon where she is an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Portland State University.

This month I got to talk to June Gehringer about her latest book. June Gehringer is the author of "I Love You It Looks Like Rain" (Be About It 2017), and "I Don't Write About Race" (Civil Coping Mechanisms 2018), the latter of which was the winner of Civil Coping Mechanisms's 2017 Mainline contest. She lives in Philadelphia and has more crushes than she can count. She tweets about it @june_gehringer, and if you're a press interested in her next book you can reach her at gehringercat@gmail.com . She's also an editor over at tenderness lit.  I Don't Write About Race can be purchased here.    Writers, presses, musicians mentioned in the show: Peyton Burgess Danez Smith Prairie M. Faul Sung Yim Naadeyah Haseeb glo worm press EVIL MTN jayy dodd p.e. garcia Alexandra Naughton Mitski Kristin Chang Hanif Abburraqib The Wanderer Zack Blackwood Editor and Social Media Manager: Mitchel Davidovitz The Sound of Waves Breaking

Brad Listi talks with Joseph Grantham, poet and author of the debut collection TOM SAWYER, available now from Civil Coping Mechanisms. Grantham was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He grew up in California. He read books for awhile and wrote bad stories and poems and went to school. Not much happened. He lost his virginity when he was 18. He got his BA from Bennington College. He still reads books and writes. He runs Disorder Press with his sister, Mik. He currently lives in Woodland, North Carolina. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The novel begins with the friendship between two young, Asian American boys in a small, Midwestern town who bond over their outcast status and shared love of comic books. Meanwhile, in an alternate or perhaps future universe, a team of superheroes debates the efficacy of protest and swaps stories of artistic ennui on their lunch breaks. Recalling the work of Tom McCarthy and Valeria Luiselli, Eugene Lim gleefully toys with narrative conventions—blending Hollywood chase scenes with sharp cultural critiques, hard-boiled detective pulps with subversive philosophy. Unfolding like the revelations of a dream, Dear Cyborgs weaves together the story of a friendship’s dissolution with provocative and lively meditations on creativity and political dissent. Praise for Dear Cyborgs  “Eugene Lim’s Dear Cyborgs is a mad badass fan letter to comicdom and a chastening reminder of how America’s greatest fantasy doesn’t involve superheroes with superpowers but the prospect of a fair and honest political life. Go read it in the streets.” —Joshua Cohen, author of Book of Numbers “Eugene Lim tells his sly superhero tales in a kind of hard-boiled deadpan—a voice at once incongruously comic and playfully soulful. Beneath the dry wit there’s an ache of loneliness, an echo of every comic-book reader’s yearning for the camaraderie of the super team, the intimate enmity of the nemesis.” —Peter Ho Davies, author of The Fortunes “Eugene Lim’s Dear Cyborgs is a secret tunnel fresh with cool, strange storms. What is it to be super? What is it to be beyond? Dear Cyborgs is ripe with mysteries, heroes, even heartache.” —Samantha Hunt, author of Mr. Splitfoot “[An] entertaining reflection on art, resistance, heroes, and villains . . . [Dear Cyborgs] is eerily reflective of our fractured times, darting from subject to subject with the speed of a mouse click. A colorful meditation on friendship and creation nested within a fictional universe.” —Kirkus Reviews Eugene Lim is the author of two novels, Fog & Car and The Strangers. His writing has appeared in Fence, the Denver Quarterly, Little Star, Dazed, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. He is the founder and managing editor of Ellipsis Press and works as a librarian in a high school. He lives in Queens, New York. Harold Abramowitz is from Los Angeles.  His books include Blind Spot, Not Blessed, Dear Dearly Departed, Man’s Wars And Wickedness: A Book of Proposed Remedies & Extreme Formulations for Curing Hostility, Rivalry, & Ill-Will (with Amanda Ackerman), and UNFO Burns A Million Dollars. Harold co-edits the short-form literary press eohippus labs, and writes and edits as part of the collaborative projects, SAM OR SAMANTHA YAMS and UNFO. Janice Lee is the author of KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011), Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), Reconsolidation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2015), and most recently the essay collection The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016). She currently lives in Los Angeles and is Editor of the imprint #RECURRENT for Civil Coping Mechanisms, Founder & Executive Editor of Entropy, Assistant Editor at Fanzine, and Co-Editor (w/ Maggie Nelson) of SUBLEVEL, the new online literary magazine based in the CalArts MFA Writing Program. She can be found online at janicel.com. Karen An-hwei Lee is author of the poetry collections Phyla of Joy (Tupelo 2012), Ardor (Tupelo 2008), In Medias Res (Sarabande 2004), and a novel, Sonata in K (Ellipsis 2017). Currently, Lee lives in San Diego, where she serves in the university administration at Point Loma Nazarene University. Event date:  Wednesday, July 26, 2017 - 7:30pm

Cooper Wilhelm is the coolerst warlock of indie lit. His new book of poetry, Dumbheart/Stupidface, out now with Civil Coping Mechanisms. He tweets @cooperwilhelm

Brad Listi talks with author Bud Smith about his new memoir WORK, available from Civil Coping Mechanisms. Smith is a writer from New Jersey who also works heavy construction. His other books include DUST BUNNY CITY (Disorder Press), F250 (Piscataway House), TOLLBOOTH (Piscataway House), EVERYTHING NEON (Marginalia), OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT (Unknown Press), and CALM FACE (House of Vlad). This is Bud's second time on the program. He first appeared in Episode 373, on July 29, 2015. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

ENTROPY is a website featuring literary and related non-literary content. They seek to create a space where writers can engage with other writers, can participate in a literary community, and where thinkers can collaborate and share both literary and non-literary ideas. Their site covers topics from video games, graphic novels, interactive literature, science fiction, fantasy, music, film, art, and other topics in addition to literary reviews, interviews, conversations, and articles on experimental literature, translation, small press practices, and performance. About Janice Lee, Co-Founder of Entropy Janice is the author of KEROTAKIS, Daughter, Damnation, Reconsolidation, and The Sky Isn't Blue. She is Editor of the #RECURRENT Series at Civil Coping Mechanisms, Assistant Editor at Fanzine, and serves as Executive Editor at Entropy. Writing Mentioned The Night Cafe by Brandon Shimoda Ghosts of Pearl Harbour by Brandon Shimoda Episode Credits Host: Rachel Thompson Audio Editor: Mica Lemiski Transcript Editor: Monica Calderon Music: https://musicformakers.com/songs/the-return/ Presented by Room magazine and the Lit Mag Love Course

Dead Girls and Other Stories (Dzanc Books) With lyric artistry and emotional force, Emily Geminder’s debut collection charts a vivid constellation of characters fleeing their own stories. A teenage runaway and her mute brother seek salvation in houses, buses, the backseats of cars. Preteen girls dial up the ghosts of fat girls. A crew of bomber pilots addresses the ash of villagers below. And from India to New York to Phnom Penh, dead girls both real and fantastic appear again and again: as obsession, as threat, as national myth and collective nightmare. Praise for Dead Girls  “An eerie convergence of female identities and experiences across time and space. [...] Startling, far-reaching tales of women who haunt and are haunted.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review “Geminder’s stories are refreshing, surprising, and evocative.”—Publisher's Weekly “Geminder showcases an acute sensitivity to worlds both inside and out. There’s real delicacy to the craft but underneath all the skill is a shaking sense of purpose, and a great love of the brokenness and beauty of humanity. This is a substantive, memorable debut.”—Aimee Bender, author of The Color Master and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake “An electrifying read. Written in dreamy prose, these stories take the world we know and turn it inside out, making us question everything we think we know about our places in it. But don’t let the dream-like quality fool you: These stories have teeth. Seductive but fierce, full of keen insights and tenacious questions, Geminder’s fearless and utterly original debut collection will haunt and nourish you.”—Dana Johnson, author of In the Not Quite Dark and Elsewhere, California “The stories in Geminder’s mesmerizing Dead Girls seamlessly weave gender and geopolitics and the dreamlike worlds of characters struggling to find hope and reason within their near apocalypses. The thread of unease that runs through the collection is insightful, rebellious, and righteous.”—Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Disappearance at Devil’s Rock “Emily Geminder’s stirring collection explores death-haunted scenarios from unexpected angles. Whether the characters are caught in the currents of Cambodian history or the private mythologies of an American summer, they’re often plunged into moments that dissolve all certainties about identity, consciousness, and the body. Etched with a matter-of-fact lyricism, Dead Girls will haunt you, sure, but that’s barely half the story.”—Jeff Jackson, author of Mira Corpora Emily Geminder’s short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in AGNI, American Short Fiction, Mississippi Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Tin House Open Bar, Witness, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award and a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and her work was noted in Best American Essays 2016. She has worked as a journalist in New York and Cambodia, and is a Provost’s Fellow in creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California. Brandi Wells is the author of This Boring Apocalypse (Civil Coping Mechanisms), Please Don’t Be Upset (Tiny Hardcore Press), and Poisonhorse (Dzanc Books). Her writing appears in Denver Quarterly, Sycamore Review, Paper Darts, Folio, Chicago Review and other journals. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alabama, where she served as editor of the Black Warrior Review. 

Hey there folks! I'm nearly done unboxing shit into my new house in El Paso, TX. Moving is something that for some reason I thought would be easy, but is actually really time-consuming. There's just eighty six things to do, and each of those eighty six things has eighty six steps. You know how it is. Anyhow, today on the podcast I talk to Bud Smith. Bud is hilarious, down to earth, and a damn good writer. He works heavy construction in New Jersey, and recently wrote a memoir called Work, which is out from Civil Coping Mechanisms. I think you'll like this one! This is also the first "short" episode. This one is an hour, but if you dig all of our talk about novelizations of ET, there's even more over at the Patreon (an extra 45 minutes, to be exact). Episodes there will be twice as long, and I'll also throw up some Patreon-exclusive eps each week. You'll get a special RSS feed when you subscribe. CHECK IT OUT. That's a shitload of stuff for $5/month, if ya ask me. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this episode, and I hope you go and check out Bud Smith's new memoir Work, out now from Civil Coping Mechanisms.

In this episode--covering Tómas Jónsson's fourth composition book--a number of the themes of the overall novel are put on display: Tómas's relationship to his body, the way he tries to create a narrative for himself, possible injustices he's suffered during his life, the way his lodgers are like an army, and more. And there's no one better to help parse these elements than author and critic Scott Esposito. He joins Chad and Lytton for an episode that may be a bit long, but is stuffed full of insight about this Icelandic masterpiece.   Also discussed in this episode is Scott's interview with Lytton for Conversational Reading.   Feel free to comment on this episode--or on the book in general--either on this post, or at the official GoodReads Group.   Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller is available at better bookstores everywhere, and you can also order it directly from Open Letter, where you can get 20% off by entering 2MONTH in the discount field at checkout.   Follow Open Letter, Chad Post, and Lytton Smith for more thoughts and information about upcoming guests.   You can follow Scott Esposito on Twitter and Instagram, or at Conversational Reading. And you can get his latest book, The Doubles, from Civil Coping Mechanisms.   And you can find all Two Month Review posts by clicking here.   The music for this season of Two Month Review is "Long Year" by The Anchoress.   And please rate us on iTunes (or wherever you get your podcasts) and/or leave a review!

In this episode--covering Tómas Jónsson's fourth composition book--a number of the themes of the overall novel are put on display: Tómas's relationship to his body, the way he tries to create a narrative for himself, possible injustices he's suffered during his life, the way his lodgers are like an army, and more. And there's no one better to help parse these elements than author and critic Scott Esposito. He joins Chad and Lytton for an episode that may be a bit long, but is stuffed full of insight about this Icelandic masterpiece.   Also discussed in this episode is Scott's interview with Lytton for Conversational Reading.   Feel free to comment on this episode--or on the book in general--either on this post, or at the official GoodReads Group.   Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller is available at better bookstores everywhere, and you can also order it directly from Open Letter, where you can get 20% off by entering 2MONTH in the discount field at checkout.   Follow Open Letter, Chad Post, and Lytton Smith for more thoughts and information about upcoming guests.   You can follow Scott Esposito on Twitter and Instagram, or at Conversational Reading. And you can get his latest book, The Doubles, from Civil Coping Mechanisms.   And you can find all Two Month Review posts by clicking here.   The music for this season of Two Month Review is "Long Year" by The Anchoress.   And please rate us on iTunes (or wherever you get your podcasts) and/or leave a review!

Joanna C. Valente & Michael J. Seidlinger sat on a rooftop in Bed Stuy & talked about their writing, Civil Coping Mechanisms, witchy empowerment, sexism, living in NYC, travelling, AWP, and so much rambling & random questions. 

Cake Time (Red Hen Press) Daring yet aimless, smart but slightly strange, Cake Time’s young female protagonist keeps making slippery choices, sliding into the dangerous space where curiosity melds with fear and desires turn into dirty messes. In “How Not to Have an Abortion,” the teenaged narrator looks for a ride from the clinic between her AP exams. In “Easy Target,” the now-college-grad agrees to go to a swingers party with a handsome stranger. A decade later, in “Glow,” she is suddenly confronted by the disturbing and thrilling fact of her lover’s secret daughter. Ultimately, this unflinching novel-in-stories grapples with urgent, timeless questions: why intelligent girls make terrible choices, where to negotiate a private self in an increasingly public world, and how to love madly without losing a sense of self. Joining us will be Jim Ruland, Victoria Patterson, and Janice Lee. Victoria Patterson is the author of the novel The Little Brother, which Vanity Fair called “a brutal, deeply empathetic, and emotionally wrenching examination of American male privilege and rape culture.” She is also the author of the novels The Peerless Four and This Vacant Paradise, a 2011 New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her story collection, Drift, was a finalist for the California Book Award and the Story Prize and was selected as one of the best books of 2009 by The San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in South Pasadena, California with her family and teaches at Antioch University.  Jim Ruland is the co-author of My Damage with Keith Morris, founding member of Black Flag, Circle Jerks and OFF! (Da Capo 2016) and Giving the Fingerwith Scott Campbell Jr. of Discovery Channel’s Deadliest Catch (Lyons Press 2014). He is also the author of the award-winning novel Forest of Fortune(Tyrus Books 2014) and the short story collection Big Lonesome (Gorsky Press 2005). Jim’s work has appeared in many publications, including The Believer, Esquire, Granta, Hobart, McSweeney’s, Mississippi Review, and Oxford American, and has received awards from Reader’s Digest and the National Endowment for the Arts. He runs the Southern California-based reading series Vermin on the Mount, now in its thirteenth year. Janice Lee is the author of KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011), Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), Reconsolidation(Penny-Ante Editions, 2015), and The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016). She is Editor of the #RECURRENT Series for Civil Coping Mechanisms, Founder and Executive Editor of Entropy, Assistant Editor at Fanzine, Contributor at HTMLGIANT, Co-Editor (w/ Maggie Nelson) of SUBLEVEL, the new online literary magazine based in the CalArts MFA Writing Program and CEO/Founder of POTG Design. She can be found online at http://janicel.com. Praise for Cake Time  “Cake Time is a delicious indulgence. Treat yourself to its dark, seductive intimacies and savor the gritty sugar of its unsentimental humor.”—Jillian Lauren, New York Times bestselling author of Some Girls: My Life in a Harem, and Everything You Ever Wanted “Siel Ju writes with refreshing candor about sexual appetite and the treacherous difficulty of finding love. There is cruelty in the search and tenderness and a lot of honest fumbling around. Cake Time is our time—a provocative debut.”—Noy Holland, author of BIRD “Siel Ju’s Cake Time is sharply observed and wonderfully contemporary: these complex, flawed, and real characters live in our current world, with all its confusions and opportunity to connect—or disconnect. It’s about the perils and pleasures of intimacy, and its heroine feels as alive as you and I. A compelling and unflinching debut.”—Edan Lepucki, author of California “Siel Ju’s Cake Time is an astonishing debut. Ju’s novel-in-stories is unsettling and fierce and full of loneliness, sadness, and humor. Her voice is so alive, and her candor—particularly about men and sex—is keenly astute, intimate, and startling. The prose is precise and poetic, and Los Angeles vibrates on the page. Wry and heartfelt and uniquely defiant, Cake Time is like a hard slap I didn’t expect or see coming.”—Victoria Patterson, author of The Little Brother and Drift “Siel Ju’s stories are not boring because they are about not-boring things, like swingers’ parties and organic fashion company beauty pageants and high school sex and breakups and hook ups. Lots and lots of breakups and hook ups. I worried for Siel Ju reading about all these breakups and hook ups. Then I reminded myself these are fictions Siel Ju is telling us, and Siel Ju is fine. We are all fine, even after all these breakups and hook ups.”—Elizabeth Ellen, author of Fast Machine and Bridget Fonda Siel Ju's novel-in-stories, Cake Time, is the winner of the 2015 Red Hen Press Fiction Manuscript Award and will be published in April 2017. Siel is also the author of two poetry chapbooks. Her stories and poems appear in ZYZZYVA, The Missouri Review (Poem of the Week), The Los Angeles Review, Denver Quarterly, and other places. She gives away a book a month at sielju.com.

  Calder G. Lorenz is the author of One Way Down (Or Another), his debut novel from Civil Coping Mechanisms. Born in Washington D.C., he has lived in numerous other states and Canada, and now resides in San Francisco, California. His shorter fiction has been published in sPARKLE & bLINK 2.4, Switchback, Curly Red Stories, FictionDaily, Two Dollar Radio’s Noise, Literary Orphans, Crack the Spine, Black Heart Magazine, Litro Magazine, The Forge Literary, The Birds Piled Loosely Press, and gravel. He has an MFA from the University of San Francisco and works in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District at St. Anthony’s Dining Room.

In today’s microcast, we get a poem by Lauren Samblanet from A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault published by Civil Coping Mechanisms. Released last week, A Shadow Map is edited by Joanna C. Valente and features poems and essays “born out of traumatizing and terrible experiences. CCM believes in providing a safe space within the literary community where we can not only talk about painful experiences and issues becomes ever more necessary considering the current political climate.” Contributors include Hillary Leftwich, Maggie Queeney, and Mila Jaroniec.

Wendy C. Ortiz is the guest. Her new book Bruja—a "dreamoir"—is available now from Civil Coping Mechanisms.  In today's monologue, I basically just get right to the interview.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ep 43 Samira Yamin & Gina Osterloh: The People On this episode our guests are Gina Osterloh and Samira Yamin. Gina Osterloh is a Los Angeles artist who works with elements of performance and drawing in photography. She has recently shown at Ms. Barbers, Francois Ghebaly, Armory Center for the Arts in Los Angeles among many other and she is in an upcoming group exhibition at Arizona State University Museum entitled Energy Charge: Ana Mendieta and her influences. Samira Yamin is an artist and a native Angelena who has recently shown at the Craft and Folk Art Museum and at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Her work explores issues of representation through photography. In a new edition of Notes from the People we have Harold Abramowitz reading from his new book Blind Spot at Skylight Books in Los Angeles on September 2nd, 2016. You can and should find and purchase a copy of Blind Spot from Civil Coping Mechanisms press at CopingMechanisms.net And we close out the episode with a song by Los Angeles artist Geneva Skeen from her forthcoming album Dark Speech, available September 23rd, 2016 from Dragon's Eye Recordings. You can find it online at DragonsEyeRecordings.com ... and the name of the track is Ambivalence

#RECURRENT, is a new series at Civil Coping Mechanisms, which launches two titles in 2016 and is edited by Janice Lee, author of Damnation,Reconsolidation, The Sky Isn't Blue, and Executive Editor of Entropy. The series will push the boundaries of narrative with books that seek to reconstruct, reimagine & expand on existing narrative spaces. Not bound to genre or category, #RECURRENT books will be intuitive, instigative, innovative, sensitive, perceptive, heart-breaking, and honest. More than anything, #RECURRENT is interested in writing that gestures towards intimacy in different ways, in writing that isn’t afraid to reveal or retreat, and writing that makes us feel all the feelings. Blind Spot (Civil Coping Mechanisms) Here, memory like a dripping faucet, slowly leaking events and considerations, one constantly feels like they are balancing on a teetering chair. This rigorous investigation of being leads one to consider the way a world revolves around a man like a vortex, the propensity of clipped phrases that alter, edit, build, revise, a constant modification of the one way one sees the world, exists in the world, remembers. Repetition, like stuttering, leads one through and around the vortex of consideration, yet like poetry the language points and articulates, then stutters again, the text as a glitchy archetype of keeping track, of observation, of the harmonious discontinuity of time’s ebb and flow: “There is no break in the harmony, and no seeing anything but for what it is.” This brilliant, poetic novel weaves a new structure for narrative, forces the reader to consider the complex and profound structures hidden in a record of time, each observation of the utterly quotidian transforming into a lyrical evocation of essential significance. Each repetition is a surprise, and each consideration an impossible enigma. Narrated by a mysterious and clairvoyant consciousness, Blind Spot, is both blind and honest, isolated and compulsive, and achieves with such magnificent beauty a reconceptualization of seeing and reading that one might enter this book through its first lines and wish to never come out again. Praise for Blind Spot "This is a gorgeous slippery novel in the mode of Georges Perec or Magdalena Tulli or Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi or . . . Harold Abramowitz! I read it with a tumbling sort of pleasure by a small body of water as a hummingbird with a purple throat came and went. It, the bird, seemed, in its hovering, to be trying to read Blind Spot over my shoulder. Is that why it kept coming back? One impossibly exquisite thing seeking another?"—Danielle Dutton “It’s one thing to write a novel about trauma – to tell a coherent story, to create (and be comforted by, to whatever extent) a narrative arc of pain and loss. But it’s something else entirely to find oneself inside a series of imagistic and syntactical loops – a Venn diagram of partial thoughts (or dreams or memories) that become more certain and more troubling each time they refuse to relate or resolve. Harold Abramowitz’s Blind Spot is not about anything – about, from the Old English, ‘outside of.’ Instead, it’s a kind of prayer made out of attention (Simone Weil). Incantatory and somatechnic. I fucking love this book. Abramowitz writes the mind and body (in trauma, in everyday life) from the knotted and careful inside."—TC Tolbert “Like a careful clinician, a mathematician of the soul, Abramowitz takes us on a voyage of cautious deliberation. How does he do it? How is it that he creates such deep suspense and eager, almost anxious, anticipation through such minute & slightly various ministrations of lexicon? Alongside him we become careful detectives of our narrators’ confusions & disappointments even as we try to discover, again alongside him, just where it is that the center of those confusions lie …. It is a strange, unsettling, and beautiful book.”—Veronica Gonzalez Harold Abramowitz is from Los Angeles.  He is author and co-author of books of poetry and prose, including Dear Dearly Departed, Not Blessed, and UNFO Burns A Million Dollars. Harold writes and edits as part of the collaborative projects eohippus labs, SAM OR SAMANTHA YAMS and UNFO. Gaijin (Civil Coping Mechanisms) “I build a body back from these fractured myths and severed edges.”—Jordan Okumura, Gaijin How can a family be a demolition of the self and a home one lives in? How does a fractured body heal a trauma through connection? Deeply embedded in the novel Gaijin, by Jordan Okumura, is an unsettling nostalgia for family and for her Japanese culture, haunted by whispers and by abandoning, by illness and isolation, by silence and trauma. The novel attempts to simultaneously track a personal rupture and a family, through the painful and awkward reclamation of the self after sexual violence and the evocation of a patriarch who is half dreamed, half real.  The narrative bravely plows forward in reconciling two disparate sources of grief in order to heal them, trying to articulate the inarticulatable in a style that straddles genres—part memoir, part mythology, and part eulogy to a grandfather.Gaijin, a first novel for Okumura, is so powerful in its poetry and aching, it crushes the breath out of you as you read, cracks your chest wide open. Though the sum of Okumura’s exquisite metaphors is often grim, tragic, there is always a glimmer in the yearning. Praise for Gaijin  “And what is the measure of self inside grief? Jordan Okumura’s novelGaijin is a body song. By weaving stories of loss and myth, Okumura brings an identity to life, half real, half imagined. I was mesmerized from start to finish.”—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Small Backs of Children “Labile, alluvial, fricative, abrasive, Gaijin cuts a channel through stone which takes the shape of its own persistence. I want to say your name with a rock beneath my tongue. It stages and restages memory to pinpoint the exact site where the skin broke and the shard sank in, then gestures towards a moment-after wherein this wound, inverted, might become both shield and sword. A nervy, unnerving book.”—Joyelle McSweeney, author ofDead Youth, or, The Leaks “Gaijin makes possible the impossible language of trauma.”— Molly Gaudry, author We Take Me Apart   “To pirate, to scratch. To press or be pressed: “into the girl corner.” To watch: “the water run home.” How the cliffs “ignite.” Jordan Okumura’sGaijin is an extraordinary book of poetry written, or so it feels, into the axial space of memory, embodiment and dream. In it, a grandfather, a man “born from tears and war,” moves from space to space, just as the narrator does: the “river floor,” the garage that becomes a Japanese theater, the mouth “that is already closed.” What does it mean to have had a hand in one’s “own erasure”? I was very moved by Okumura’s decision to make a book the site of “wet erosion,” tongueless. And yet the stories pour out, “beautiful” in their “heat.” Towards the question. Of what it would be. “To stop.” I am honored to write in support of Gaijin, which takes it’s place in the contemporary literatures of exile and diaspora: an index of fire and water, “original bone,” and light.”—Bhanu Kapil, author of Schizophrene   “Reading Jordan Okumura’s poetic prose will change the way you breathe and the way you move. Her prose reaches inside you, caresses the very core of who you are, and transforms what you thought you knew about love, hope, and desire in unnerving ways. Her writing does not simply remind me of the writing of Carole Maso, Helene Cixous, and Marguerite Duras; her writing extends this tradition of intimate, passionate writing that does not fear the pain of seeing into truth. Gaijin will awaken you to new ways for seeing and feeling. Each time I have read Gaijin, I have come to know something new about myself, about my own heart. It is rare for a first novel to look in such a relentless and courageous way into familial relationships and memories as does Gaijin.”—Doug Rice, author of Between Appear and Disappear   The narrator of Jordan Okumura’s haunting and evocative Gaijin says “I “want to live the life of tongues.” But what if that tongue has been inscribed with the language of others? In lyric prose born of breath and body, Okumura wrestles with questions like: How to find one’s self when “memories don’t know how to stay past?” How to “reconcile the possibility of a girl and men” when those men have stolen all possibility from the girl? How to escape the legacy of a father when that father “is me. Wrapped in the stone of me?” In doing so, she gives us a beautifully fractured story of a journey to uncover the history of a woman hidden within the history of a family. I dare you not to fall under Okumura’s spell.”—Peter Grandbois, author of Nahoonkara Jordan Okumura is a writer and editor. Her work has been published inGargoyle, DIRTY:DIRTY (Jaded Ibis Press), Black Rabbit, and First Stop Fiction. Jordan lives and works in Sacramento, California where she is an editor for trade news publications in the agricultural industry and is a regular contributor at Enclave/Entropy. Gaijin is her first book.

Brandi Wells is the guest. Her latest novel, This Boring Apocalypse, is available now from Civil Coping Mechanisms.  Brandi moved to LA recently to get her PhD. She's going to be a doctor of literature. She's a shy Southern girl originally from Georgia and spent time in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, which she loved, and which she misses, and we talk about that. She is also very much into body dismemberment—I don't mean to say that she wants to dismember anyone, or be dismembered herself. She's just fascinated with the body and with the alteration and desecration of the body, and with the body generally. We talk about that, too. What else? She used to hula hoop a lot. Not in a hippie way. In a circus way. And she grew up going to a Pentecostal church where people spoke in tongues and writhed on the ground, electrified by the power of The Lord. All of this and more in today's episode. In the monologue, I talk about the shutting down of LAUSD schools due to an unspecific terrorism threat, and about the fear in the air, and my outrage over all of the recent violence and America's stupid gun laws, and the chaos and horrors of the Middle East, and so on, and so on. All of it.  I attempt to get it off my chest.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we have two short stories from Jeff Musillo. They're each conversational, things you are overhearing or being directly told, or even confessed to. While each story centers on damaged men, one of them absurdly, hyperbolically so, they are each darkly funny. Jeff is the author of The Ease of Access, Can You See That Sound, and Snapshot Americana. His new novella, The States is published by Civil Coping Mechanisms and is available this Friday (11/13/2015).     Conversation topics: writing, Nickelodeon, TV, screenwriting, film, publishing, process, Brooklyn, Charles Bukowski, inspiration, learning, failure.    Music by Mon Nobi MUSH   If you would like to submit fiction, narrative non-fiction, or poetry, between 1,000 and 4,000 words, send it to: unknownwordspodcast@gmail.com   Follow the show Twitter Facebook Instagram

Sean H. Doyle is the guest. His new memoir is called This Must Be The Place, available now from Civil Coping Mechanisms. The Chicago Tribune says “Memoir depends on its teller for empathy and insight into its subject’s character. Angry, obliterated, yet, by turns, mournful and self-aware, Doyle lays himself bare. But he manages to do so without eliciting pity or scorn. In others’ hands, similar material — drug abuse, desperate sex, violence, suicidal thoughts — have often resulted in wallowing or descriptions of depravity for depravity’s sake. It is a testament to Doyle’s clear examination and probing of his past that when he drops us into one charged situation after another we neither sink nor are incredulous at the messes he finds himself in. His spare words rescue us from despair, while still communicating the profound pain of just being alive with pinprick precision.” And Juliet Escoria says “Reading This Must Be The Place is like getting mugged, and then once the mugger takes your wallet, they push you on the ground. And then once you’re on the ground, they kick you in the stomach, over and over and over again. And then when you think they’ve finally decided to leave you alone, they kick you once more in the teeth. The only difference is that when Sean H. Doyle is mugging you, the experience is cleansing, invigorating, something that tests your heart but also makes it glow, an experience you don’t want to ever stop. Otherwise, they’re basically identical.” Monologue topics: pregnancy update, David Letterman, Indiana, canoes, my dorm room, the elevated couch, retirement, going out on your own terms     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Timothy Willis Sanders is the guest. His debut novel, Matt Meets Vik, is available now from Civil Coping Mechanisms.  Blake Butler says "I have no idea how Timothy Willis Sanders is able to accumulate so many small reflections into such a mesmerizing mass. Matt Meets Vik makes maybe the most stripped-down paragraphs I've ever seen somehow hold a hundred thousand colors, emotions, tones, like if there were a website that made you forget all other websites ever existed, or that you're even still online. Hilarious, moving, insane, real." And Megan Boyle says "As I was reading Matt Meets Vik (and long after I'd finished), I couldn't get the voice of 'Matt' out of my head, like it gave my inner monologue extra-charming-sounding subwoofers. Everything I did felt funnier and more important. There are only a few books that get in my head the way Matt Meets Vik has. This is one of my favorite books. I didn't want it to end. I can see myself reading this many times." Monologue topics: my daughter threw a fit, mail, Neem Karoli Baba Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Luckily for Eric and my fool self, Juliet Escoria happened to be in town to do a couple of readings and we were able to hang out/sit down/tell jokes/rap with her. Her book BLACK CLOUD came out earlier this year from Civil Coping Mechanisms, and it is a monster. We talked about the process of writing a book to getting it into meaty paws and recovery and teaching and exposed Eric's lack of a goth past.

Ana Carrete is the guest. Her poetry collection Baby Babe is now available from Civil Coping Mechanisms. Sam Pink says “The first time I heard Ana’s writing was 2 years ago. In November of 2010, I read at the ‘Ear Eater’ reading series in Chicago. Ana was another reader. She was reading via Skype. There were a lot of people at the reading. After I read, I walked out of the room and stood in a hallway, staring at the floor. After a few difficult conversations with people in the hallway, I heard the host of the reading talking to someone on the computer. It was Ana. Ana started reading. I laughed a lot and enjoyed her reading. Seemed like other people weren’t enjoying it as much as me but I was enjoying it a lot. I stood in the hallway laughing and shaking my head ‘Yes’ and people looked at me. I kept thinking, ‘I want to go into the room and watch her face reading’ but then I would think, ‘No, don’t do that, just listen.’ Not sure why I kept telling myself not to go into the room where she was reading but I stood in the hallway and listened and enjoyed it a lot. Two years later, Ana emailed me Baby Babe. I opened the PDF just to skim a few poems but then I read the whole book. When I was done reading the book, I thought, ‘I’ll be glad to have this book so I can look at it whenever I want.’” Monologue topics: foreign languages, bilingualism, power dynamics, ego, inferiority, anger. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Juliet Escoria is the guest. Her new story collection, Black Cloud, is now available from Civil Coping Mechanisms.   Adam Wilson says "Juliet Escoria is like a gutter-punk Grace Paley." And Benjamin Samuel, co-editor of Electric Literature, says "Reading the stories in Black Cloud is like getting punched in the throat; Juliet Escoria leaves you speechless. Her honesty teaches us that beauty can be found in violence, truth in pain, and life where we've always been afraid to look." Monologue: travel, American Airlines, family, fatigue, weddings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael J. Seidlinger is the guest. He is the book reviews editor for Electric Literature and the founder of an independent press called Civil Coping Mechanisms. His latest novel is The Laughter of Strangers, and it is available now from Lazy Fascist Press. The Los Angeles Times says "The Laughter of Strangers delivers a combination of psychological horror and strangeness that would not be out of place in a David Lynch film. Seidlinger's weird new fight fiction suggests that perhaps the best place for boxing contests isn't in the ring but between the pages of a book." And Flavorwire raves "Michael J. Seidlinger has given us the boxing novel of the year. The Laughter of Strangers is a tough and gritty book that will challenge you page after page, but it is oh so worth it." Monologue topics: psychological paralysis after reading, chaos, illusion, confusion.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jordan Castro is the guest. He is the author of several books, and his latest is a poetry collection called Young Americans, available now from Civil Coping Mechanisms. Ben Brooks, author of Grow Up, says “I read these poems three times in one night, then put the duvet over my head and held my knees for a while. It’s good when something makes sense. I really really liked these poems.” And Chris Killen says “If you are a person who doesn’t really know what they are doing and you would like to read about another person who doesn’t really know what they are doing either, I recommend reading this poetry book. I enjoyed reading these poems. Or something.” Monologue topics:  Episode 150, premium bonus content, Megan Boyle, Mira Gonzalez, Sam, Skype, festive moods. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Matthew Salesses is the guest. He is the author of two chapbooks, Our Island of Epidemics and We Will Take What We Can Get, and his new novel is called I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying, which is published by Civil Coping Mechanisms.  Matt Bell raves “In Matt Salesses’s smart novel-in-shorts, a newly-minted father flees telling his own story by any means necessary—by sarcasm, by denial, by playful and precise wordplay—rarely allowing space for his emerging feelings to linger. But the truth of who we might be is not so easily escaped, and it is in the accumulation of many such moments that our narrator, like us, is revealed: both the people we have been, and the better people we might be lucky enough to one day hope to become.” And Catherine Chung says “Matthew Salesses has written an extraordinary and startlingly original novel that explores connection and disconnection, the claims and limitations of the self, and the shifting terrain of truth. Poetic, unforgettable, shot through with fury and yearning, I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying captures in clear and chilling flashes our capacity for the cruelty and tenderness of love.” Also in this episode:  a conversation with Reality Hunger author David Shields. His new book, How Literature Saved My Life, is now availalble from Knopf. And later this year, in September, he will publish The Private War of J.D. Salinger, co-authored by Shane Salerno. Monologue topics: mail, literary ambulance chasing, luck, cause and effect, beautiful people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices