I’ve spent time lately learning how to format manuscript and book cover files for digital publishing platforms. If you’re familiar with HTML and CSS, the process isn’t too difficult or even that scary. It merely entails converting files via a digital uploading platform and then going through the converted files to make sure that the text is formatted accurately.

Converting files of fiction is a pretty simple process. After all, the fewer formatting requirements a file has, the fewer times something has the chance to go wrong — just make sure paragraphs break where they’re supposed to, margins are aligned and indentations set at the same inch ratio, and, for the most part, the rest is smooth sailing.

Poetry, on the other hand, is like dealing with an insufferable kid with peanut butter and jelly all over his hands sitting in the back of your new car kicking and screaming, all while you’re trying to navigate inner city rush hour traffic. In other words, it’s a bitch. But no matter, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And formatting so many impromptu line breaks and off-key indentations has got to be worth something, right? Right.

(more…)

If you don’t know Ryan Bradley, well you just haven’t been paying attention, have you? Today we talk with him about the fragility of human relationships and what it means to be an ugly writer.

Tell us about the first story or poem you remember writing.

I always loved reading, but for a long time I hated writing. In 7th grade we had an assignment where we had to write a poem. I was so upset about it that I decided to stick it to the teacher by writing the dumbest poem ever. I wrote about a candy bar wrapper blowing in the wind, like a tumbleweed. To my disappointment the teacher really liked it and, secretly, so did I.

(more…)

More. Like Moragas and madelaines and De Sades and Defoes and Yoknapatawphas and Yankees and moveable feasts and wrathful grapes and chac-mools and water babies and cold blood and tropics and trilogies and McCuller’s jockey and yeah, believe it or not, eventually, even crap like Jersey Shore and Sister Wives and Kate Plus Eight and A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila and Flavor of Love, but with Borges-like brains behind them, and much, much better. What it’s about will not be contained or outlasted, connected to the same umbilical cord as the eternal “and so it goes…”

You know. It does.

(more…)

If I had a dollar bill, I couldn’t drink my fill. That dollar bill goes to the dog.  In the environmentalist tome The Bear, Sam Fathers and Ike were searching for the dog. I knew when I found my dog, but I didn’t know how to name him.  While scrubbing his piss off the floor, I found his name on the spine of a cd on the forgotten bottom shelf. Townes the dog is Townes the musician through and through — coyfully playful, bipolar and a downright lovable scoundrel. I’m sick as a dog (and wondering the etymology of that phrase).  But I have Canine Townes at my side and Audio Townes on speakers, so I’ll make it. While that may not work for you, here’s some reading that will.  Sam Anderson hadn’t listened to rap when he reviewed an anthology of said music.  What did he think once he heard a little hip hop?  Townes the poet may have spent that dollar at Joseph Mitchell’s McSorley’s.  Roger Day says we’ll always have that wonderful saloon.  Colin McCabe reviews a new biography of Claude Levi-Strauss.  Euna Lee was a journalist held in North Korea; she answers questions about the dangers of journalism.  I wonder if she agrees with Jonathan Ree and Nietzsche.  Tell me where to lay my head….early in the morning.

___________________________

Meg Pokrass is a fiction writer who lives in San Francisco where truth is questionable. Her debut collection of flash fiction, “Damn Sure Right” will be published in 2011 by Press 53. Meg’s work was selected for Wigleaf’s Top 50 Flash Fiction 2009. She has published over one hundred stories and poems. You can see more of her animations at pokrasstinations.com