I’m pleased to announce that this year’s Dark Sky Books Poetry Contest is now accepting submissions!

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Order your copy of Ark Codex as a pay-what-you-want PDF or a $40 full color book.

And check out an excerpt we published in DSM 15.

Alan Rossi’s story, “Blackberries,” appears in Issue 15. Here he discusses the story, the fruit, and tells us not to take field trips.

“Black or white, it didn’t matter, they were all pale.” Do you think this relates to an innocence, a lack of experience?

I think that’s a really cool way of seeing it. I can’t say exactly what I meant by this line because I don’t remember writing it. I remember seeing it many times when I was again looking over and working the thing, but I don’t remember writing it. I see it as, yes: that these little beings haven’t been out in the world. Maybe better: they are in the world but don’t know it. They are in the world but asleep to it.

Why do you think the experience leaves everyone “aching to be fed again” ?

This is how all beings are, human or no. And I don’t really know what human means, but you know, people we typically call human who are walking around and eating blackberries and stuff. We are not only wanting and desiring all the time, but many of us are aching with want, painfully wanting. The thing with the blackberries, it may be a small thing, but it’s also an extreme (in that it’s different, new) experience and many extreme experiences, if experienced in some way as good, are one that leaves tracks in the brain that lead to more more more. Wanting it again and again and again.

The hand of the child at the end is “sticky, warm.” Does this relate to the children walking away changed by the blackberry bush?

Yes, change, but also cycle, also circle. It is the step into needing needlessly. The residue of the need, always there now. It is another thing to want, a thing to have hunger over. If they are changed in any way, it is that they want more now. The blackberry bush I think is the object of wanting which intensifies the wanting when the thing wanted is gone, which is a difficulty because blackberries aren’t easy to find the wild dreamy world.

Does the teacher ache to feed again?

He believes he’s aware that one taste is enough, he’s aware of this. And yet he isn’t able to do anything with this awareness. An awareness of the want is not enough to kill the wanting. You can see that to me all over this piece is wanting, wanting. I don’t know why. I wasn’t thinking wanting when I wrote it. The teacher has a kind of sickness, a kind of need for control though he doesn’t know why, control of the kids and their impulses, yet he can do nothing with his own.

What do you think was the teacher’s accidental lesson?

Don’t take field trips. I don’t know. I think it’s more how he now knows that whatever he expected to do here, that didn’t happen. In fact, maybe the opposite happened. And what he expected and the opposite are both uncertain in my mind and unknown in some way for the teacher.

Brandi Wells can do things other writers can’t get away with. This was discussed, in some respects here, but the premise of that particular discussion might have not been overly singular.

Please Don’t Be Upset is Wells debut out this year with Tiny Hardcore. The introductory story, “Instructional,” originally ran in a web edition in PANK. The story is sort of a ‘how to rape a kind-of willing girl’ guide, and it sets a clear tone for the language and humor that is evidenced throughout the book.

Pull my skirt up roughly (because, really, doesn’t it have to be a skirt? It’d be hard to rape someone in jeans).

Pull your cock out –

But isn’t that awkward? Do you pull it out with one hand and hold me down with the other? Maybe you lean hard against me so I can’t get away.

Much of this collection is written in second person, and the narrator often seems sarcastically unsure.

In “A Dozen Notes to Ruben” (c’mon Wells, next time be pretentious and call it ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Boyfriend’) Wells writes:

I have seen you eat a piece of your sock, dig in your ear with your glasses and then sniff your glasses, scratch your butt, pick your nose, belch, fall down, and piss on my bedroom floor and I still love you. Please never tell me if you see me do these things.

Here lies Wells’ true talent — the trait which lets her reach topics where others cannot stray to — a sort of calm, uninhibited honesty.

Take for instance this bit of near sex from “Claim”:

We didn’t have sex, but would reach into each others’ pants. I wrapped my fingers around his cock and held it. He cupped my pussy in one hand. We fell asleep that way and with our foreheads pressed against each other. The warmest parts of our bodies, touching.

When at her best Wells reminds me of Amy Hempel’s “The Most Girl Part of You” (which is apparently being turned into amovie, kinda). The best stories in Please Don’t be Upset are saturated with quirk and vulnerability.

Consider “Sock Addiction,” the story of a would-be girlfriend, who accompanies ‘Joe’ to a department store and “aids” his endeavor to fill all of that store’s socks with cum.

We make the rounds twice a week and rotate stores, so it doesn’t look suspicious. And I start wearing tights, so pulling up my skirt won’t be so revealing, but he convinces me to take them off too. So I stand in the sock section, tights dangling in my hand, while he’s smack, smack, smack. I worry someone will hear him, so sometimes I pretend we’re having a conversation.

“We should probably try to grab lunch early,” I say.

“Maybe we can see a movie,” I add.

This relationship peaks before it crashes:

I start dressing up for our trips to the department stores. I buy lace underwear, thongs at first and then the crotch-less sort. I work out so my thighs will be toned and my ass will be firm. He appreciates it. I can tell because he fills almost twice as many socks. He holds my hand afterwards and I help him return the socks to their display rack.

But ultimately, due to the nature of the relationship, the courtship has to fail:

But after a few months Joe seems less interested. He doesn’t ask me to hike up my skirt and when I do anyway, he doesn’t look. He just jacks off into the socks. He doesn’t say a word. I help him put the socks up and he holds my hand loosely for a few seconds before he lets it go. And after a few more weeks, he quits calling me to go with him. I follow him and stand an aisle over and peek at him through the racks. He jacks off into a sock while rubbing another across his chest. I think he sees me, but he doesn’t say anything and we don’t make eye contact.

Wells is at her best when she works in first or second person. I was not blown away by her third-person offerings (though I’m a little suspect of the third person sometimes, because if anything is fragile enough to be shattered by the existence of a single ‘I’ then it is perhaps a gimmick best left unexplored((and I’m not entirely certain I believe that at all))).

“Contortionist Ballerina,” which is written third person,  didn’t seem to fit in the book — but it originally appeared in Mid-American Review, and I think writers have to watch out for that. I think there is a tendency when putting together a collection to include stories that have appeared in ‘higher tier’ magazines because there is a thought that its presence in the collection will further legitimize the collection. I have absolutely no way of knowing if this was Wells intention, but “Contortionist Ballerina” seemed to fall a bit flat, seemed a bit lost.

Still, most of this collection had me gleeful, God damn it. I liked the fuck out of it. Here’s a last scene from “A Conversation with My Obligation” just to make you smile one more time:

“Do you think you could lie on the table?”

My obligation climbs up onto the table, but at the last minute I have to hold it down. I pin it with my knees and hold its arms behind its head with one hand and cut down its belly with the other.

“There’s no glitter,” I say.

My obligation laughs. Inside my obligation is an identical obligation, eating a pickle.

“I like pickles,” that obligation says.

I got three more Tiny Hardcore texts which I’ll be reviewing in the coming days. I was supposed to have one up each day this week, but then life came along, raped me in the ass while I was wearing a skirt.

I’m gonna go check Facebook.

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Occasionally people who edit magazines or edit anything will complain about writers who still put an extra space between sentences like this.  The writers were once told to do it and they kept doing it for years.  And years.   And years.         Years.

But there’s a really simple way to change all the doubles to singles in MS Word. All you do is:

1. Go to “Replace…” under “Edit.”

2. In the “Find:” field, enter two spaces.

3. In the “Replace:” field, enter one space.

4. It will go through your doc and get rid of all the extras. Unless the person you are editing is really zealous and included some triple spaces. In that case, just run it again one more time.

Boom. Maybe lots of people know this trick, but I discovered it just by fooling around and I find myself using it all the time.