And We're Back!

We’ve already had a few big snows in Colorado, pumpkin beers abound, and Leonardo DiCaprio is making a scrunchy-faced Oscar grab. It must be November.

A few developments since last we talked:

• The Missouri Review has created a free online resource for creative writing teachers, featuring the best poems, stories, and essays from its considerable archive. One of the featured stories is Aimee Bender’s “The Rememberer,” and as a supplement, TMR has also posted my interview with her from last summer. I’m still in awe of just how relentlessly pleasant she was to talk to. Keep an eye on her. She’s got a future.
• I recently had a story accepted in Ninth Letter. It’ll be out in the spring/summer 2012 issue. More on this as the issue gets closer.
• Over the summer I got a dog, an Australian cattle dog/boxer mix. His name is The Bunk. And The Bunk can’t swim, but he can jump, so if anyone has any stellar tips on how to keep pups from jumping up on strangers, please send them my way.
• If you’ve never been to the Great American Beer Festival, you owe it to yourself to go. Or, to buy me the ticket you’re not going to use anyway, since I will be going every year for life from here on in.
• The best book I’ve read this year wasn’t released this year: Gentlemen’s Blood, a nonfiction history of dueling, by Barbara Holland. It’s full of stories like two dudes having a shootout in hot air balloons and Danish land disputes being settled by pitting a young man against an old woman, with the caveat that the young man was submerged to his waist in a pit and the old woman got to shoot at him with a slingshot. And you think America is overly litigious?

I’m going to make a concentrated effort to update this blog regularly over the next few months, bringing you the publication news, interviews, recommendations, and tangential jags you didn’t even know you wanted.

Onward.

Comments

[Jon Sealy]

Welcome back, sir.

[Brian]

Thanks, amigo. Nice to be back.