PRATE

Matthew Revert

How does one describe a book such as A Million Versions of Right, the collection of short stories from Australian literary first-timer, Matthew Revert?  Not an easy task, especially if one wants to avoid repeating all other attempts, every single one of which can be distilled to the words ‘bizarre’, ‘hilarious’, and ‘disturbing’.  An interview with Matthew Revert by PD Lussier.

So then what about the author?  How the hell do I introduce Matthew Revert in a way that offers meaningful insight on his indescribable work? Bizarre, unusual, hilarious, and disturbed???   After all, anyone whose mind can generate such stories surely qualifies to have his name designate some new mental disorder in the latest version of the DSM, right?

Alas, Matthew can’t bank on any pity inducing freak-factor; despite all expectations, these stories are in fact the product of an overly sane mind.

Indeed, Matthew would be a worthy poster-boy for that scarce and paradoxical crowd I playfully label as rebelliously un-rebelling rebels—those whose still fully-functioning sensibility fills them with disgust in the face of the world we are forced to passively accept, but whose razor-sharp acuity allows them to discern the futility and inevitable despair behind wanting to function outside of certain societal constructs,  while  a profound sense of identity enables them to reach for the ‘meaningful’ and scorn the ‘prosaic’ knowing full well that their version of Happiness relies on the acceptance that their non-conformist goals are dependent on conventions and conformity.

Understanding this about Matthew Revert doesn‘t make describing his book any easier, but it certainly should make it clear to you that this book aims to fall well outside  of that weird-only-for-the-sake-of-goofy-novelty mess that festers the mainstream bowels of Bizarro and Absurdist fiction in much the same way that love songs were soiled by Air Supply.   Rather, this book offers a crucial and refreshing difference that should instantly establish it as a prototype of the Bizarro genre (perhaps New Absurdist?  Subject for a debate no doubt).  That difference is: in these stories, the nonsensical actually makes sense and the illogical is firmly grounded on logic, i.e. they have a raison-d’être. Continue Reading…

Greg Smith

J.M. Reinbold interviews Delaware author Greg Smith, author of “Final Price”.

JMR: Hi, Greg! Please tell us a bit about yourself.

GS: I was born and raised in Washington, DC. I have a BA in English from Skidmore College and an MBA from the College of William & Mary. I worked in public relations in DC and moved to Delaware to get married. I also worked in PR in Wilmington and Philadelphia before committing to fiction writing full time.
Continue Reading…

Tim Gaze

Tim Gaze is the publisher of Asemic Magazine, a publication dedicated to the presentation of Asemic writing. Interviewed by Lynn Alexander.

By Tim Gaze

ASEMIC:
It looks like writing, but we can’t quite read it.
I call works like this “asemic writing”.

LA: Starting off with asemic writing, how did you become interested? Do you find yourself explaining what it is, only to be asked why you do it? Not to say that there even has to be a reason for art or writing, but people often want one or feel entitled to one, to some kind of justification. Do people ask about your objectives with asemic work?

Do you find that people easily misunderstand?

TG: I used to write quirky fiction & poetry. somehow, after a holiday in Indonesia, talking in Bahasa Indonesia for 2 months, I started to make wordless squiggles of symbols. Continue Reading…

Ben Tanzer

“What they struggle with is what they feel or don’t feel, the inability to communicate what they are feeling and how it is we connect with others.” Ben Tanzer, interviewed for PRATE by Peter Schwartz

P.S.: Ben Tanzer is one of those guys you meet and like within seconds.  He’s agreed to talk to me here and I’ve agreed to use my big boy voice.  Welcome Ben, why don’t you tell our good readers a little about yourself and how you can change their lives?

B.T.: You are very generous, and it’s clear you have picked-up on one of my worst not so hidden traits – I love flattery, both giving and receiving.  I would add here that I appreciate your interest in interviewing me and I think you look great today.  Is that a new shirt?  In terms of myself, I used to tell people that I was a founding member of Wham!, but they soon realized that was maybe not entirely accurate.  I blame Wikipedia for that and now I tell them I used to be Ric Astley.  Beyond that I went to the same high school as Rod Serling, albeit after he did, and if you forced me to pick whether I am a Star Trek person or a Twilight Zone person, I would choose the latter.  I also went to high school with Lisa Baylor who you probably don’t know, but wish you did.  I was interviewed on the debut episode of the now long defunct MTV Sports show.  Continue Reading…

Tim Hall

Tim Hall is a writer and multimedia artist, also a journalist, editor, and publisher.  He is the author of two novels, Half Empty and Full Of It, a collection of stories, Triumph Of The Won’t, and the book-length nonfiction essay, How America Died. Interviewed for PRATE by Lynn Alexander.

LA:      Talk about the “Grandiose Failure”. You describe characters who have a sense of entitlement about success, perhaps a disconnect concerning their own practical limits. In addition to those limits, there is also the problem of numbers, which don’t really work in a would-be big shot’s favor. How did you develop an interest in exploring this theme, the ideas of grandiosity, entitlement?

TH: It comes out of my own upbringing, growing up with two very theatrical parents who despised each other so much that they were willing to sacrifice us, their kids, to satisfy their sadistic hatred. Neither was suited for any kind of business life, and certainly not parenting, but they were playing roles imposed on them by society and family pressures, and it destroyed them and damn near us. So that’s the basis for my morbid fascination with such people. Continue Reading…

Michael Kimball

Michael Kimball, interviewed by Peter Schwartz for Full Of Crow. Michael Kimball’s third novel, Dear Everybody, is available now- and he is still working on the ongoing interactive art project: Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story On A Postcard. Links at the end.

P.S.: I’d like to start out by thanking you, Michael Kimball, for agreeing to do this interview.  My first question is when did you become so interested in other people and their stories?  I think your life story on a postcard project is brilliant, I’d love to know exactly how that came about and what you’ve learned from what you’ve done so far.

M.K.: I’ve always been interested in other people and their stories.  My older brother used to get annoyed with me for asking so many questions, so did my father.  But the postcard life story project came about because my friend Adam Robinson (#45) was curating a performance art festival, the Transmodern in Baltimore, and he asked me if I wanted to participate.  We joked about what a writer could do as performance and I suggested that I could write people’s life stories for them as they waited.  The idea was absurd, but it was also fascinating, and it seemed oddly possible if it were contained to a postcard.  Adam insisted that I give it a try and that’s how the postcard life story project started.  I thought it would be fun and funny, that I would ask a few questions and write on the backs of a few postcards and that would be it.  The first postcard life story I wrote was for a painter, Bart O’Reilly (#1).  When I finished writing his postcard and looked up, a line had formed.  For the rest of the night, I interviewed dozens of people and wrote their postcard life stories.  It was intense and intimate.  I remember being struck by how earnest and forthcoming most people were, how eager they were to share their life stories, how grateful they were for their postcard.  It was later that I started the blog and opened the project up to everybody. Continue Reading…

Mike Philbin

Mike Philbin is the author of “Bukkakeworld” and “Planet Of The Owls”, and the editor of the Chimeraworld anthologies. He was a good sport about all this, as I knew he would be. -Lynn Alexander

LA:You have been doing a lot of interviews, answering questions on everything from your work in the video games industry to vampire fatigue. Is there something people are missing, something you’d like to go off about but it doesn’t seem to come up in the process?

M.P.    Is there something You The People are missing? Well, yes. Everything. Fact: You The People are stuck in a consumer loop from which you’re gonna find it very difficult to extricate yourselves in coming years of Obama-enforced austerity. You The People is the name of a novel I’m working on that will show just how asleep the majority of the general public are. It’s not a pitying book nor an admonishing book. It’s a work of genreclectic fiction in the same way that 1984 and Brave New World were works of genreclectic fiction. You The People projects contemporary complacency several microseconds into the future to show what happened to mankind as it languished in its societal slumber. It’s a stark warning to all 6.66 billion corporate persons of this cowed planet.

L.A.It seems like a particular challenge to make surreal horror, to push the boundaries of genre fiction, “genreclectic” fiction- and to also make it uniquely disturbing, distinct for the reader. Do you find yourself having to really work at staying away from some of the gimmicks and traps, do you ever start to fall into those grooves, or even into marketing grooves, then have to shake yourself out of it?
M.P.    I think calling it ’surreal horror’ is a bit of a misnomer. Surreal horror implies a subset of horror. And those who’ve read my interviews over the last decade know I don’t have the greatest admiration for the ‘dull grey horror product’. Genreclectic fiction is something that allows me to steer clear of the horror writer tag (and its legion of negative connotation) and simply write about all the horrors that haunt us when we have down time or when the demands of the world leave us staring into the middle distance with a high-pitched ringing sound in our ears. As far as marketing goes, you realise that ‘the reader is the enemy of creativity’ and kow-towing to his demands is like career suicide? How best to explain this, creative people never work to order, never tailor to audience, never truly ascend to the corporate-sponsored suck-top of bland popularity. Good for them.

L.A. Some of the art you seem to admire seems not to be necessarily or conspicuously twisted, but actually seems hyper-realist. For example, some of what I find unsettling is the way that some of the human figures in some of the artwork you are into are grotesquely natural- not distorted. Death-as we know but seem to forget when we are confronted by a realistic, albeit nasty element- is actually a pretty disgusting affair replete with fluids and strange positions. Can you talk about what draws you into a work, what kinds of qualities you seem to respond to more readily? Continue Reading…

Bill Blackolive

Bill Blackolive

Wild Bill Blackolive has been an outlaw folk writer since the sixties. His memoir, The Emeryville War, chronicles his life “on the fringe of Berkeley in the 1980’s…Wild Bill, who lives in a backyard in his broke-down car with his barbells and a litter of pit bulls.” (ULA)
I crossed paths with Bill and his daughter Madrea through the Guild Of Outsider Writers, and after reading Emeryville, I knew he was somebody I needed to interview!-Lynn Alexander

L.A. What are you interested in doing these days? What are you involved with? Plans?

B.B. I look after my 89 year old mother from one pm till seven thirty am when the good helper woman, Janet, comes.

Firstly after coffee and silly Corpus Christi newspaper then stretches, I take the two dogs I have currently out for an hour, bike or walking, depending on injuries, have an old bad back (visit a chiropractor lately but once in five weeks) and a few months ago I cracked my left kneecap which has caused complication. I next soon had cracked my left big toe with a fifty pound dumbbell, when the knee had suddenly buckled more complications for months now, and lately I am using a bicycle. We live just out of little Aransas Pass, a lot of trailers, some crank labs and maniacs driving insanely in the night but this is an easy enough environment for me and the dogs, and my mother’s yard is fenced. With dogs, I wave at all motorists, be they hostile or what, and thus it is for years here and the motorists just about all wave now, friendly or not, many very friendly. Continue Reading…

Michael Jacobson

Michael Jacobson presents collections of asemic writing at his website- The New Post Literate. Interviewed by Lynn Alexander.

LA: When I think of your work, I think of the asemic writing- of course. But what else are you interested in? What other kinds of writing are you interested in?

MJ: I am interested in many forms of writing, from the beat generation writers, to the French symbolists, Graffiti, undeciphered scripts, xenolinguistics, sigils, etc. I think a lot of these different forms of writing have greatly informed & added depth & substance to my asemic writing. I consider my work to be a bead on a string with regards to the history of experimental literature, with asemic writing being the most recent bead added in a long string of avant-garde writing. Continue Reading…