News, Other Stuff

For forty years she dropped petals from her eyes. Every tear like a dream cast to bloom adrift in the oceanwind. The shore sent echoes from its shells, speaking to her in the lost fragments of scattered lives.

Every year, she scoured the shore for tones that reminded her.

What do you search for?

Wandering stars.

She kept her eyes to the skyline, the constellations that remained fixed, though she begged them to move, to shift, to rewrite themselves and send his message across the universe.

She bottled the ocean in mason jars, one every moon cycle that he was gone. They lined her room and bent the sunlight and moonlight.

What do you search for?

He promised to return.

The petals fell and she planted them in the sand. Each falling petal, a memory of a life she led as a youth, with golden hair and longing eyes, dancing legs and loving sighs. In the twilit years, her hair flattened and blackened, her legs thickened arthritic. The petals cascaded brighter, livelier each year, incandescent, scorching virility into the earth.

They swallowed her house, the vines grown from them, fecund veins pulsing against the walls, securing the breath of the house, washing it in a rainbowed sheen. She sat inside and waited for the tide to bring news of him, even dreadful news, even his death or that he forgot. But nothing came. No sign or words, no song or star, no whispered echo of the ocean.

The petals came. One by one and hue by hue. They piled after the forty years, her house an organism, phosphorescing in the dark nights, refracting daylight like the scales of a fish, the petals blown in the oceanwind making the colors shimmer, dance.

The people came then. They came from far away, from close by. They came to watch her drop petals from her eyes. They came to tell stories, to hypothesize, conjecture the who, what, and why, the how.

They touched her virile home and complained of poison burns, of noxious pollen, of children's safety.

They kept their distance but spoke louder.

She stood with her feet in the lapping of waves collecting ocean water beneath the full moon, petals floating like sinking ships in the tide.

They called for ordinance, for legislation, for police procedure.

She stared upward, waiting for the sky's calligraphy to change, listening to the heartbeat of the ocean.

With lawyers and environmentalists, they tore her memorial house from its roots, burnt.

We're, obviously, fans of books, but we're very much fans of art in general.  We have a keen interest in comics / graphic story-telling, something we'll pursue further in our future publications.  With this in mind, we're thrilled to launch our very first serial graphic-story on our blog -- Asylum Doors by Chicago-area artist Chris Prunckle.  This graphic-story will come out once a week until it is done, starting next Wednesday, October 31, Halloween!  Get a glimpse of the story below.

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What happens when a psychic who can’t control her powers gets institutionalized?

Bryce Dekker is a young woman that has suddenly been given extraordinary power, a psychic link to her surroundings. In her desire to help others, she becomes entangled in a murder case where her knowledge of specifics has made her the #1 suspect.

Now mandated to undergo observation at Werthem Glen Sanitarium, Bryce is at the mercy of her fellow patients. Surrounded by madness and unable to control her power, she is having a hard time separating her thoughts from the insanity around her.

Bryce has found only one way to keep track of reality, and that’s by keeping a record of the visions and voices in her head. She has become the vessel for those around her, telling the stories of their illness. She is the biographer of their insanity. Their stories have become hers, and Bryce’s only hope is that by embracing the madness, she finds her sanity.

Stay tuned for the first installment of Asylum Doors next Wednesday October 31.

Chris Prunckle is a graphic designer, illustrator and comic book artist banished to the suburbs of Chicago. Though an advertising industry minion by day, he slaves his nights away creating a mad little world.  He’s previously worked on the comics Fisted, Bonesetter, and The Scarab.

Luis Humberto Valadez is a writer/poet/educator/musician from Chicago Heights, IL currently serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in China.  "Out of Context" will be a blog Luis will write for us documenting his experiences in China.  He is the author of two collections of poetry, "what i'm on" (2009, University of Arizona Press) and the book/CD "Valid Lush" (2012, Plumberries Press). His music and poetry can be found at luishv.bandcamp.com. Previous to leaving Chicago, he was Program Director for Chicago HOPES, an organization that provide education and enrichment programming for children living in homeless shelters. Hit him up with thoughts, questions, etc. at luisvaladez8@yahoo.com. He is truly exploring the nature of his being outside of the context he has grown accustomed to. This writing merely reflects his perspective of his experience and does represent that of other Peace Corps Volunteers or Peace Corps as a whole.

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Zhe ben shiji gei ni wo zai xiang shenme.

Today, I’ll eat dinner at the same time that you many of you will drink your first beverage of the day, however caffeinated it may be. Today is my fourth day living in Neijiang. I arrived here Monday afternoon, sharing a ride with an 19 year-old Australian volunteer whose Chinese is so good I can’t help but look like an asshole every time we speak to the same people. I’ve spent the better part of this week cleaning up and settling into an apartment that has had many a former PCV as its inhabitant. More on this will be said at another time, however. Today, I’d like to focus on my last week of training in Chengdu. It’s been an eventful last couple of weeks, hence the absence of an update last weekend.

Actually, I need to clarify that I didn’t actually train in Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan Province. Though my group trained at Chengdu University, the University is located outside of Chengdu in a small town named Shi Ling.

A year ago today
I published my first book.

I had been waiting 100 years to write a book.
I waited patiently for characters and plots and arcs and endings
to present themselves and cursed them when they never came.

Then someone made me realize none of those things were important.
The most important thing was to just WRITE
and I'd been writing stories since I was seven.

One morning that person woke me up and over coffee
he handed me 150 pages of a neatly printed manuscript
with a giant paper clip.

I looked down at it and said:
What is this?

He said: This is your book. You have a book now.

The cover page read: Piano Rats.

As I flipped through the pages, I cried.
He was right, it was my book.
All the stories I had written for myself over the years,
they finally had a home.

He sipped his coffee nonchalantly and said:
This is good and you better print it.
And after ripping it to shreds a few times,
I finally did.

You never know when an ordinary morning
can change your entire life.

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*Photo by Stephanie Bassos, Chicago-based photographer.

Franki Elliot is a 20-something author from Chicago and blogs for us every Monday.  Curbside published her first book Piano Rats (October 2011). We are publishing her second book KISS AS MANY WOMEN AS YOU CAN in late spring 2013.  This week is the one-year anniversary of PR.  For more Franki typewriter stories visit http://frankielliottypewriter.tumblr.com/

Music and books are two of our favorite things, which is why we, duh, like to publish books, and we like to throw parties that feature music.  So, as a natural extention, one of our favorite sites is Largehearted Boy, a blog that features authors writing about the music that influences their work.  Thus we're excited to see LHB publish an essay about the songlist for our newest book MAY WE SHED THESE HUMAN BODIES in the author Amber Sparks's own words.  Check it out. 

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Largehearted Boy MAY WE SHED Playlist