Ryan Rivas was born in Miami, FL, in the era before 305 became 786, and Luke Skywalker became Uncle Luke. He is editor and co-founder of Burrow Press. More of his writing can be found at ryanrivas.net. He is mad at the person who took the dot com. He does impersonations real good.
Hello. The blog is no more. But you can still read your favorite columns, like The Shimmying Writer, Books Borrowed from my Ex, Reading Books While Burping my Baby, and 15 Views of Orlando, in addition to weekly fiction/essays/book reviews/interviews at Burrowpressreview.com
As soon as we figure out how to feed recent posts from there onto our homepage, there will be no more need for this note. But for now, go to BP Review and read some stuff.
It is once again that time to highlight an author who appears in the upcoming Burrow book, 15 Views of Orlando. This time, we’ve got an author who used to live in Orlando, moved to Seattle to resurrect the dream of the 90s, and now lives in an undisclosed liberal elitist haven in the Northeast. Amid all this ping-ponging, we hope he will visit Orlando again soon, and perhaps, grace us with a reading…
Too quick across the face of this earth, Tom DeBeauchamp has never watched a puppy grow up to a dog and die. His stories and reviews have appeared here and there, online and in print. He waits for mail that never comes. He attracts sometimes the inverse of moths and jars them and stores them in cool, damp, dark places where they batter the glass with their bodies, desperate to touch the unity for which inverse moths despair. He reminds you we are all closer always to the molten central fire than we’ll ever be to the distant radiations of space.
Tom’s 15 Views of Orlando story culminates in Lake Keogh, a man-made lake near the Red Lobster in Waterford. Tom also appears in the 15 Views bonus features, where he has this to say, among other things, about Orlando:
It’s been years since I moved away, and most of what I remember is vague and hazy, the feel of driving in the heat with the air off, the sprawl west of Alafaya and the forgotten scrublands between Bithlo and the beach. I remember it being an unformed place, or a place with a sudden form, like everyone there was confused about how they’d ended up there, uncertain about how they’d leave. It had a transitory skin. But there were others, other transients who’d been there longer. I remember it as one of the strangest places I’ve ever lived…
Tom has reviewed books for HTML Giant, The Collagist, and others. His fiction has appeared (mysteriously and sometimes ordinarily) in Hobart, Smalldoggies, in Burrow’s first anthology, and elsewhere. Click, read, enjoy.
With the upcoming release of 15 Views of Orlando, Burrow Press is highlighting a handful of the book’s contributors. Here’s one now!
John King, an aficionado of college degrees, recently acquired his fourth, an MFA in creative writing from NYU. While his doppelganger proudly teaches composition and creative writing at the University of Central Florida, John currently resides at an undisclosed location and toils on his epic novel, Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame. He also reviews books for The Literary Review and theater for Shakespeare Bulletin. His work has appeared in Turnrow, Gargoyle, and Pearl, and is forthcoming from Palooka.
John’s 15 Views of Orlando story is set in Crocodile World, which, for non-locals, is a caricature of a real place called Gatorland. He also wrote a Florida literature manifesto, which appears in the book’s bonus features. Here’s a brief excerpt:
Florida—this peninsula stretching from the American south to the subtropics, fragmenting into the archipelago of the Keys—is intrinsically dramatic, an epic provocation to the imagination. The state is wild, from ancient kudzu-choked forests of the north to the expanse of the Everglades where prehistoric reptiles still roam in their almost unimaginable realness. And the sky: almost unbearably blue and infinite over flat horizons, with cathedrals of wispy clouds hovering like heavenly thoughts, so meticulously idyllic that they look painted on by Renaissance masters.
And of course John’s work has appeared elsewhere. Here’s a poem called “Spinning” and a short story called “Guy Psycho: The Savior of Pop?” for you to enjoy until the book release party on Jan. 31st at Urban ReThink, 6-9pm, where John is a featured reader
For those who did not attend Holly Tavel’s reading at Urban ReThink this past Wednesday, you missed a great couple stories. The first one is about 15 minutes, and it tells the story of Teddy (the boy in Ricky Ticky Tavi) as a grown up. It sounds like it cuts off but that is, in fact, the end. The second story is a ridiculously hilarious meditation on the Swiss, which Holly read while playing the according, an instrument she picked up something like 6 months ago.
The Secret History of Ricky Ticky Tavi by Holly Tavel
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All About the Swiss by Holly Tavel
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Holly Tavel is a writer and artist whose fiction has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, Torpedo, Elimae, McSweeney’s, The Prague Anthology, Diagram and others. As the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship in creative writing, she moved to Prague, Czech Republic in September 2009 to research a novel-in-progress. She received an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University in 2006, and has since taught at Brown, Grub Street Boston, BMCC-CUNY in NYC, and at the University of New York in Prague. As a former member of Glowlab, a Brooklyn-based artist’s collective, she collaborated on projects involving public-space performance, social sculpture, and experimental walks and was editor of Glowlab’s online Neuroscape Journal. Also, she plays the accordion.
I Have Touched You
by Gregory Sherl
Dark Sky Books, 2011
44 pages, paperback
The first time you read through Greg Sherl’s I Have Touched You, its quick, repetitive sentences slough you off like dead skin or rainwater. Its steady, innocuous rhythm casts a lulling spell, and the constant explications wash over you without your having registered them as separate or distinct from the primary flow of phrases. You get the impression of a period of time, a few pockets of geography—mostly Florida, but also an exile to Virginia—and you get a vague sense of actions having taken place, or, more accurately, taking place right now in an oppressive, half-decade-long present tense. By conflating all acts and moments to this single present—sometimes with details from one year enumerated shoulder to shoulder with identical details from years later—the whole concept of present is flattened, broadened, and expanded into an atemporal plane upon which some of life’s events happen. What the book gives you access to then is an essentially static epoch mediated by its heartbroken, bipolar narrator. The progression of time is stalled, and any sense of continuation or movement is subordinated to the rock-like pressure of space alone. Sherl dedicates his book to “anyone who has ever felt stuck,” and creates with the banal repetitions of drugs, sex, depression, music, poetry, and soap, a hypnotic and paradoxically slick sort of stickiness.
I Have Touched You‘s great strength is in its ability to balance reems of over-articulated sameness with hidden moments of difference. It is, contrary to first appearances, a gem of control and restraint. Though the narrator is free with certain details—drugs he’s taken, who he has slept with, under what circumstances, and in what positions—he keeps other, more vulnerable details hidden. The effect is that when, on page 31, nearly two-thirds through the twenty linked stories that make up the collection, you get this passage—
“Two years ago I quit cigarettes, but what’s one more? At the Tin Can I drink two tall boy PBRs very fast. I sweat when people look at me. If my other sister didn’t die, would I smile more? Someone says What do you want? I say Pizza with grilled shrimp on top. Laura is married, but she’s touching my leg.”
—you are devastated. You knew about the cigarettes, you knew about the drinking, the anxiety, the likelihood that a married woman would touch his leg. But that he had a sister? That’s new. It’s a detail given with the same tonal weight as any of the book’s other details. It isn’t dwelled on. It is established as one point in a narrative space crowded with other details and that’s it. Though the fact isn’t mentioned again, it extends backward across the 30 pages preceding it and re-characterizes everything. It is a plot twist as surely as a bloody dagger found in the houses of parliament. Interestingly, it is precisely the sameness, the repetition of events and tone, that allow this new event to take on such epic weight.
In this way, the steady patter of details reveals, if hazily, a plot that serves not only to connect the vignettes across space, but to reintroduce, and to make possible again, the distinctions of time. The plot points lay out in the narrative field like a shipwreck; reading them, aside from enjoying the beach and the sun, is like sweeping your metal detector over the sand for traces of the dead or else the explosive that prompted their drowning. Each echoing scrap of relationship triggers your re-understanding of the linear. There was a time, and as you read you come to understand what it was. When Girl #2, married now, emails the narrator to say “Remember when you came on my chest?” in “Poem as Leaving” (p29) it calls you back to this passage early on in “Florida: An Essay” (p13) :
“Libbie comes back to my apartment and showers. We make out above the covers. Girl #2 still texts me. I write back I only came on your chest because I didn’t want to be a father. I haven’t smoked a cigarette in so long that when I do, I can feel it in my toes.”
It seems plausible that the original mention of his coming on her chest was a response to this second mention, though, at the same time, it just as easily implies a history of identical text message and email conversations. What is being sketched in these short, corresponding passages is a pearl of time. The time when he is discussing with Girl #2 fatherhood and ejaculation; the time when Girl #7 is painting him; the time when he is dropping out of school and moving to Virginia. These pearls, connected, arrange the narrative like a necklace tossed in a drawer.
Because they track the essence of the whole, it’s worth sharing all mentions of Girl #3′s documentary:
Girl #3 is making a documentary about her heart. Forty-seven minutes into the film I show up on a Vespa, a Camel Light behind my left ear. She says I can feel the sun bleaching us. I hold her until someone builds us a bed in the left corner of the set. She closes her eyes, and I start picking cotton. Through her nose she says Thursdays suck, man. I nod into her top molars, the back part of her tongue that has never seen sunlight. (p20)
Girl #3 is making a documentary about her heart. In it I say Do you need some water? Three weeks later I’m sleeping on the floor. (p22)
Girl #3 made a documentary about her heart. It’s playing at the Lyric sometime after the sun falls below the dirt. I sit in the balcony. The soundtrack is someone slapping a rubber band against an empty plastic bottle. A voice over goes There are days when we only know what we know. In the opening scene Girl #3 wears a polka dot dress I remember touching her in, but here, in this scene, there’s someone else touching her. I have a headache but no Tylenol, only cough syrup. I drink it anyway. The timeline is fucked up; I am agitated I didn’t buy popcorn. Forty-seven minutes into the film Girl #3 and I smoke cigarettes on my patio. I say If I were a TV show I would change my title every year. We fuck only twice. Each time, I lick the beads of sweat off her upper lip. I have never left Virginia and missed it. (p27)
Girl #3 is making a documentary about her heart. I make a cameo in the second act, right after she throws up in a garbage can, her hair too short to get in the way. (p29)
Girl #3 is making a documentary about her heart. She’s editing it right now. Your cameo might get cut she says. Maybe it’ll make it into the special features on the DVD. I understand. There are too many people who know how her thighs smell, and I tried only twice. I miss the way you kiss I tell her. Like a rocket ship. (p33)
Girl #3 is remaking a documentary about her heart. In it I say That was a casual use of metaphor. The last time I paid to be teased, I was a straw in her mouth. (p41)
While taking these passages out of context changes their shape, it nevertheless shows the deepening effect of their repetition. Neither the documentary, nor the narrator’s role in it, nor anything else is spelled out, but they don’t have to be. The physical book space, the two pages between the semi-hallucinated first mention and the more straightforward second, is enough. It’s a kind of narrative memory colonization or world-building, built from the tension of incompletely, even contradictorily, told events. What is actually happening in minute 47? Is he on his Vespa? Are they smoking? What’s the actual dialogue? Not knowing the singular truth opens a multiplicity, not of possibilities, but of coextensive truths, all of them laid out across the narrative plane.
Greg Sherl has created a nuanced, multi-dimensional world full of anxiety, insecurity, love, and heartbreak. More importantly, he has done so in a bewilderingly immersive way. His world, at first a flat, sealed surface of repeated details, quickly becomes porous. Through the tiny ruptures formed by the inversions of time, the stunning sudden revelation of things hidden, and a masterful control of rhythm, tone and assertion, he opens space. Like blowing up a balloon, I Have Touched You stretches a small bit of material wide over what appears to the naked eye to be absolutely nothing.
The thing to do now would be to spread this image out across the internets. If you want an email-sized invite, or a hi-res, 11×17 version of the above poster, for the purpose of printing and posting on your company’s water cooler, or stapling to your daughter’s lunch bag, or whatever, then email ryan@burrowpress.com.
A lot of people in the slam community credit Paul Devlin’s SlamNation as a catalyst for them to get off their asses and start a slam in their town, be a slam poet in their town, or both.  The documentary inspired me to strive toward becoming a literary rock star, which I’m still working on.  My catalyst in starting the poetry slam here in Orlando came in response to a letter the Orlando Weekly published by performance poet Sandra Monday in 2000, who lamented the conversion of Java Jabbers into Back Booth and Orlando’s lack of culture.
*
Put Back Booth on back burner and get involved – (Orlando Weekly: 9/14/2000)
Regarding the letter from Sandra Monday [“Beat doesn’t go on at Back Booth,” Sept. 7]: Over the last five years venues and weekly programs for poetry have diminished exponentially in Orlando.  We used to have the Yab Yum, Java Jabbers, Stardust, Performance Space Orlando and other locations.  Now poets are relegated to scattered open mikes in family bookstores.  Isn’t Orlando supposed to have the culture of a burgeoning metropolitan area?
Unfortunately, Orlando as a whole feels the need to be more attractive to transient citizens than to those who live here day in and day out. Â Do most of us want our city to be famous for theme parks and boy bands? Â No.
We need a major art/literary movement to awaken the minds of the 180,000 plus citizens of this town.  We need the world image of Orlando to be broadened.  All major cities have culture.  Look at New York, Chicago, San Francisco.  All of them have a national, if not international, recognition of their advances in all forms of art and culture.  Why can’t we share the same prestige?
There are a brave few who try to bring culture to our city.  Some of them include Victor Perez and Patrick Scott Barnes.  But they can’t do it alone.
And there are those who complain about the lack of culture and do nothing.  Those who do nothing and complain don’t deserve to complain.
And this all comes back to you, Ms. Monday.  I have read two letters making similar complaints in the Weekly, yet I don’t see you taking action to change things.  I’m making the rounds.  I’m seen around town, and I’m the managing editor for a publication that promotes free ideas and culture, ironically sponsored by the Sentinel.  I’m trying to make Orlando a better place.  I know you, and others like you, can as well.  All you need to do is DO SOMETHING.
J. Bradley, Managing Editor
UCF’s IndePENdent
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A month after that was published, I got my local English honors fraternity to help me start a poetry slam on UCF’s campus.  After, I quit my managing editor internship and focused on starting the Broken Speech Poetry Slam.  The IndePENdent folded, eventually.  The slam turns ten next week.  I think I made the right call.
Starting a show is tough.  Maintaining it week in, week out, month in, month out, is excruciating, but the sense of community it creates and the art it brings out makes the agony and the heartache worth it.  In 2000, the poetry scene was watery at best.  Now, we have amazing performance and writing talent in people such as Tod Caviness, Brendan Earl (you may know him as Ronin), Curtis Meyer, Shawn Welcome, and rising talent in Alex Ruiz and Sam Lamura.  We went from being smacked around left and right by bigger, badder cities at the National Poetry Slam, to holding our own, to beating those bigger, badder cities.  We’ve got an open mic devoted to poetry almost every night in Orlando.  It’s safe to say poetry’s healthy in this town and I can take some comfort I have something to do with that.
What gives me more hope in the cultural health of this city though is seeing the writers that came from here or migrated here making a splash in indie lit world, such as Laura van den Berg, Timothy Dicks, and Lindsay Hunter; and that Burrow Press is giving it a go in indie lit publishing here; having cool neighborhoods like The Milk District, and more art galleries like Neon Forest popping up around town.  We’re not there yet, but in comparison to where Orlando was in 2000-2001, we’ve come a long way.
I’ve made a lot of mistakes doing this, I won’t lie.  I’ve alienated people, been an unjustifiable asshole at times, but I’ve learned a lot from these hard lessons and overall, I think I deal with people better in running the slam and in life.
What can you do to make Orlando even better in the next ten years?  Do something.  You don’t have to slam, you don’t have to write, you don’t even have to be artistic, you can still do something.  Support your local arts, tell people about the cool stuff you saw, take part in the things that go on around you.  Do something, something small or something large.  Do something.  Orlando has enough haters.  We don’t need one more.
In ten years, I’ll still be here.  Maybe Broken Speech will be around still and we’ll get to talk again on its twentieth birthday, maybe it won’t be.  All I know is while I live in this city, I will do what I can to make it better.  What are you gonna do?
—
J. Bradley is the SlamMaster of the Broken Speech Poetry Slam, which takes place every Third Thursday at Stardust Video & Coffee around 9:30 or so. Â The slam will celebrate its tenth birthday at The Cameo Theatre on January 27, featuring the No More Ribcage Tour and a three-round poetry slam. Â Check out J. Bradley at iheartfailure.net.
This kid doesn’t like books for Christmas. Sure, it’s cute now, but when he’s giving handjobs behind the Arby’s because he’s illiterate it won’t be so cute.
Page 15 is a children’s literacy nonprofit. (The aforementioned kid’s parents should look into this.) Each year they put out a Holiday Gift Guide consisting entirely of books. One section of their guide highlights Holiday Books You May Not Know.
This year I thought about doing Christmas cards in Comic Sans just to annoy my friends. All you Twits out there may have noticed Comic Sans was a trending topic on Twitter, mainly because of this site. McSweeney’s beat me to linking their oh-so-funny Comic Sans stands up for itself post, but Imma link it anyway because it’s really funny. Also, check out this Comic Sans-related design pledge created by Orlando’s Lure Design.
Sometimes I wish ubu.com would continue with the 365 Days project, in which you can find musical gems such as “Even Squeaky Fromme Loves Christmas.”
And what Christmas would be complete without Kanye West all up in your ears?
All I want for Christmas is to watch the Magic beat the Celtics (nothing personal, Celtics).
Murry Christmas Y'all!
