Benjamin Brindise's Blog

Now that the second draft of A Bad Spot is done and is ready to be handed out to beta-readers before the third and final draft, it's become time to consider the finer points of the query letter that will go out to literary agents when I finally try and sell this thing.

I beat my head against the wall trying to write the hook-line, but I'm not satisfied with any of them yet so I'm not going to share those. It's like trying to formulate a pick-up line to break the ice with a girl you have no chance with.

The mini-synopsis is okay for a first draft, though. Let me know what you think. Would you want to read this book?

"Rodney, an orphan, and his wife Nelly, a run-away, have been each others family for the last ten years. Their life in a loft in downtown Buffalo, NY is made of moments, friends, and love. Until Rodney receives an inheretence from a late aunt he wasn't supposed to have, and the Girard's find themselves faced with an estate that is suddenly theirs. They'll make their way to Rockland Lake, an old town founded by Archibald Girard. For Rodney, it's time to rummage through the boxes of a family he never knew he had. For Nelly, Rockland Lake is about to become a nightmare as she finds the past is calling and the shadows are filled with more than just dust."

I can't stand labeling. Cutting written work up into genres and then sub-genres and then sub-sub-genres is at best annoying to me, at worst detrimental to the work you're labeling. Often times the really good ideas break down the walls of the boxes we try to put them in and trying to reinforce the separate labels only serves to cease the power of their intersectionality.

But, I'm a writer and if I want to sell my work I have to figure out witty synopsis' and genre tags that will draw people to the work. About a year into writing A Bad Spot, my first full length novel, I had to stop and ask myself: What the hell are you writing?

I put it off some more because the first draft wasn't done and there was no point in figuring where it fit in the landscape of American writing if it wasn't done. Tell the story. Worry about everything else after.

When it came time - about eight months ago - to dig into the first draft and turn it into a second draft (or an actual manuscript as I consider it) I knew I'd written a horror novel. But what kind of horror novel?

Of course there were the "Is it scary?" questions that came to mind as well. I mean, God, isn't that the crux of it when you're writing horror? Do we care if the prose is beautiful? Did we carefully craft a narrative? Who cares? Is it scary!? Cause if not, then what the hell did you just waste your time doing?

My editor helped assuage the "Is it scary!?" terror and so did a very few first readers who got to see parts of it before it is released to beta readers. This left me to focus back on: what the hell did you just write?

After much internal debate I realized I'd written an American Gothic, but not quite. I couldn't have written an original American Gothic because the context for writers of that era is gone. It couldn't be a New American Gothic a la House on Haunted Hill or The Shining because, again, the context for writers of that era is also gone. I could no more write a New American Gothic than Poe could write something about third wave feminism. It's just not in linear time's cards.

But why can't I? Because what scares us has changed. At its best horror is the mirror held up to our every day fears. As the eras pass, what scares us changes.

A Bad Spot, therefore, falls into a new category. When thinking about what to call it exactly the term New-New American Gothic came to mind. I quickly crumpled it up and threw it away for reasons you can probably guess. I settled instead on Millennial American Gothic because that's what it does. It reflects our fears - those of us under the age of thirty who still built forts in the woods and then witnessed the transition to the social media era all in the same coming of age period.

We watched the collapse of the nuclear family, the rise of terrorism, the cultural awakening to social injustice, racism, and xenophobia. We have also given witness to the erosion of what it means to be American. Our generation is one of collapse and I believe our fears closely mirror that. I find people my age constantly wondering where home went and what our meaning is in an increasingly hostile world. This book strives to address these issues.

Since I can't go too much further into it without giving too much of the book away I'll stop there and instead ask you: What scares us now?

Followed

"Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I wish, I wish, he'd go away"
- Hughes Mearns


It started with a story.

Three months in and the house was great. Frank said his ex-mother-in-law owned it and didn’t mind renting it out to us at a discount price. The neighborhood was nice and even though the outside looked like a dump with peeled gray paint and a slanted porch roof, the kitchen had new counters and cupboards and the whole downstairs sported hardwood floors.

And then there was the Throne Room. The last tenant was so old he didn’t want to walk upstairs to use the main bath, so he knocked out the wall between his bedroom closet and kitchen pantry and added a toilet. Now the shoe box of a bathroom got more play on the house tour than the big screen T.V. or the creepy attic.

Frank got the larger room downstairs and parking privileges for the driveway, but I got a chance to get out of my parents house. He neglected to tell me he was a Followed until three months in.

By then a few things had happened. They were little things at first. Frank’s favorite hat went missing, which he bitched about for a week or so, but then dropped. Then there was the new issue of Maxim that disappeared out of the bathroom. It started with little things—things you could forget.

---

I woke up one Sunday to the sound of my bedroom exploding.

The house party the night before left me passed out on the couch downstairs. My shirt stunk of dried beer. My head beat to the rhythm of the loud crash, followed by the thud of objects scattering across the carpeted floor. It was clear my dresser had been tipped over, but with Frank sitting in his room it wasn’t clear who did it.

Burglars were a concern, but a burglar sneaking in the second story window on a Sunday morning to knock over my dresser didn’t seem plausible. I sat up, tried to ignore the nausea, and rushed toward the staircase.

Before I could make it to the lip of the stairs another swift punch pounded the floor. Something was doing this, calling attention to itself, beckoning me. It sounded angry. Minutes passed while I stood there, looking up the stairs at the double windows near the landing.

After some time passed and it remained quiet I took a step up.

Frank grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back downstairs.

“Don’t go up there just yet,” he said. His thirty-three year old face looked double that, darkness hidden somewhere it hadn’t been before. It was like a shadow rolled over him that wouldn't leave no matter what light he was standing in.

“You heard that, too?” I asked.

“Yeah, except I know what it is,” he said. “Let’s go have a cigarette, I gotta tell you something.”

And that’s when Frank told me he was a Followed. That was his word for it, not mine. I would have just said I was haunted if it was me, but Frank claimed it had to be a ghost if you were going to call it haunted. He said it wasn’t a ghost we were dealing with, it was a Shadow Man.

“What the fuck is a Shadow Man?” I asked.

“Well,” Frank started, taking a pull from his Parliament and licking his lips before continuing, “I’m not sure there’s a technical definition for it. I only know what’s happened to me so far.”

“Which is?”

“I saw him the first time when I was six years old. I was playing in my room, you know building blocks or whatever, and I looked up and saw him on the wall, watching me. Except I can’t say for sure he was ‘watching’ since you can’t really see his face. He’s just an outline, but you can make out his hat; one of those Dick Tracy jobs, like he’s from the 40’s.”

I thought Frank was full of it, but I smoked the cigarette he lent me and listened anyway. See, I liked all that paranormal stuff, always had. I used to watch Sightings on the Sci-Fi Channel, following the story of the Heartland Ghost and all the other UFO stories they had. Believing never had much to do with enjoying a good story for me.

“The thing that makes him different from a ghost is that he doesn’t haunt a place like a normal ghost does. He follows me. No matter where I live he’s there, he’s attached to me,” Frank said with ease, like he was explaining addition instead of pseudoscience.

“All your other room mates know about this?” I asked, half joking.

“I tell ‘em all in time, but some find out on their own.”

His room was in the back of the house, but every ten minutes or so we’d hear another loud bang from upstairs. I kept imagining my room littered with glass and broken picture frames. I was more concerned with a rabid raccoon than a Shadow Man, but I listened just the same.

“Have you ever tried to prove he’s there?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Frank said. But that was it.

“Yeah, what?” I asked. “What’d you do?”

“I was actually living downtown at the time, in one of those doubles on Humboldt. I was staying with Lanie, you met Lanie over at Joe’s house on St. Patty’s day. Anyway, I was staying with her at the time and she walked in one day and found all the burners on the stove on full blast. The flames kicked up about six inches, she said. The whole place smelt like gas.

"I had to tell her the deal at that point, except Lanie wanted more answers. I never messed with Shadow Man myself, always figured it was too dangerous, but she wanted to know.”

I was sitting on his bed. He was posted up on his computer chair, leaned forward, looking at the ground. He crushed his butt in the tray on his desk and lit another.

“And?” I asked, batting at the ball of string he placed in front of me, getting caught up in the yarn.

“She slept in the room with the crawl space door. One day before we left for work we left a recorder in there, seeing what’d pick up. We saw something on T.V. about being able to do that and figured we might get something.” Frank said.

“Did you?” I asked, looking at him while he looked at the floor.

“We listened to the whole tape, fast forwarding a little here or there, but there was nothing except static and a few normal sounds like pipes creaking. Then we got to the end of the tape, the part where Lanie got home and walked in her room to grab the recorder. You could hear her footsteps when she walked in and then you heard it talk.”

Without expecting it I got cold. The worst part was it being a Sunday morning, the birds outside chirping, the neighborhood kids splashing in a pool. Some asshole was already cutting his lawn, but who could really get mad at him when it was such a nice day?

I barely got my next question out.

“W-What’d it say, Frank?”

“It said, ‘Here she comes’ and then there was a bunch of scratching like a hermit crab started crawling away dragging it’s shell behind it.”

We sat in silence for a while until I asked for another cigarette. My nerves all felt fried, like I’d accidentally stuck a gardening shovel through an underground power line. Frank handed me another cigarette, but I dropped it when another blast pounded upstairs.

“What the fuck is going on up there?” I asked, almost pleading.

“Nothing,” Frank said. He turned towards his computer and pulled up his Facebook, clicking through pictures from a concert we’d been to a week before.

“What do you mean nothing? My whole dressers gotta be upside down up there,” I said. There was no other explanation for the huge racket that started it all off.

“Go look if you don’t believe me,” he said. “Nothing’s gonna be moved. It’ll be just like you left it.”

Later I did go look. It was just like he said. Nothing moved.

---

A couple weeks went by with nothing of note happening.

I started to grow comfortable with the idea of Shadow Man, even joking about him with Frank, yelling obscenities and blaming things on him like people used to blame everything on El Nino. Frank always told me to cool it down. He was joking, but still seemed half serious.

I found an old For Rent sign at the dollar store and taped it to the crawl space door in the upstairs hall way. Frank laughed at it, but there was something in his laugh that said he was glad it was me doing the taunting.

The more comfortable I got with Shadow Man the less he came around. I was the doubting Thomas, practically begging for a corpse to show up so I could put my hands in its wounds.

At thirty-three and twenty-two, Frank and I converted the dining room into a bar, with all the traditional fixtures you’d expect, including a dart board. We always fooled around with the idea of a pool table or a foosball game, but there wasn’t enough room. A dart board was perfect hanging on the wall. Frank took care of all the accessories, including picking up new darts every time we snapped a tip. Eventually we were down to three good darts and then one night we got knocked down to two.

It was my turn, the first two darts stuck into twenty and a double nineteen, but the third smacked into the wall, the plastic tip breaking, the flimsy fins falling out on the floor. The actual dart bounced off the ground and skidded away. We looked for it, under the table, the bar, the couches and the chairs, but we couldn’t find it. We played on with two, Frank winning on some last minute bulls-eyes. By the time we were done we’d cut through half an eighteen pack and forgotten all about the disappearing dart.

The next day I was downstairs doing laundry, all the lights on, just in case. Scooping up my basket I headed for the stairs, but something caught my eye, the way a quarter does under a car in the parking lot. In the corner of the basement, under an old cob web covered chair I found the missing dart.

Rational thinking can be a bastard when the thing you’re thinking about isn’t rational. I spent the week after figuring out every way the dart could have bounced off the floor, banked off the wall and skidded down the stairs, but even if that was possible there was no way it could have carried enough momentum to land under the chair.

But then things were calm again for a couple of months. Frank and I fell into a rhythm of playing darts, drinking beers and smoking cigs in the bar after work. We left the light off, opting for the glow of the giant Miller Chill light up bottle hanging on the wall instead. Combined with the string of Christmas lights we had pinned up around the ceiling it gave the ambiance of any other hole in the wall bar you could go to.

We did that and for a while forgot there was someone else living in the house.

---

Frank left for his night shift at noon and I didn’t have to be out the door until one to be on time for mine. That meant he showered first, and I took up occupancy of the upstairs bathroom an hour later. We both played loud music while we showered. The I-Pod dock sat on the bathroom sink, and I popped mine on before walking back downstairs to grab my cell phone in case someone called.

When I came back up the stairs I froze. The “For Rent” sign I taped up as a joke was backwards, the door to the crawl space ajar just enough for a small slice of darkness to hang over my head while I looked up at it. Music started to blare from the I-Pod dock louder than it was capable of playing. It was a song I didn't know.

I couldn’t move for fear I’d catch something from the corner of my eye, or turn into the bathroom doorway and see something silhouetted on the wall. Worse than the fear of seeing something was what it might do to me, slipping from the wall and sliding up my arms, in my mouth and inside me.

The I-Pod stopped, skipping like a CD might, but a MP3 player shouldn’t be able to. The glitch forced the song to repeat in rapid succession the end of one word and the beginning of another. When it combined Shadow Man's message became clear.

“De-Vil, De-Vil, De-Vil, De-Vil, De-Vil, De-Vil...”

I stood listening until I couldn’t stand it anymore, but instead of making it the rest of the way up the stairs I turned around and ran back down them and out the front door, trying to scream, but finding my breath caught somewhere below my vocal cords.

I called Frank later that day and told him I was out. To my surprise he understood. I guess this wasn’t the first time he’d had it happen to him.

---

I moved home for a couple weeks, bunking in my old bedroom at my parents before moving out into my own place. My mom called me the second day I was in, asking if I’d moved her blow dryer, but with my short hair I told her I’d never used it. She let me know she couldn’t find it.

My third day in the new apartment I couldn’t find my wooden spoon to stir my boiling pot of spaghetti noodles and I started to get the feeling I was being followed.

(originally published in Down in the Dirt Magazine in 2010. Revised 2016.)

Finding performance poetry in June of 2013 at the Pure Ink Poetry Slam in Buffalo, NY completely changed the course of my literary career. I've said it a million times already, but even when studying creative writing, poetry never really connected with me. In retrospect I think that had more to do with my inability to perceive the nuance in that medium at the time, but walking into Merge on Delaware and witnessing (and unsuccessfully participating in) my first poetry slam constructed a bridge in my mind that got poetry's message across.

For the next two years I found myself immersed in the world of spoken word. It was new and liberating and gave me a sense of self that writing fiction in solitude never did. Instead of long hours in libraries, or shut away in a room, literature suddenly took on an interactive and social platform. I met dozens of writers, traveled to cities across the east coast and Canada and eventually made it to California for my first National Poetry Slam. It was a great experience and formed how I approach my career through today.

It also got boring.

Another poet I know says that slam is perfect for those with the "employee mindset". You show up, you put the work in, you go home. You don't run the event, you don't grow the event, you just use the platform. It's a great place to start because it's structured, the rules are clear, and you know what to expect when you walk in. You can prepare. I agree, it's a great place to start. It's a horrible place to stay.

Almost a year into regularly competing in poetry slams the itch to do something more was already appearing. Around that time I co-founded Living Poet Society (Li.P.S.) with two other local poets. The organizations goal was to provide a showcase of spoken word poetry and to put it in a venue that raised the credibility of a fledgling scene. After two years, four shows (the latter two at Shea's Smith Theater, seating over 175 people and providing an opportunity for 18 different poets from the region to get paid for their work), newspaper articles, successful promotion, etc, it all started to get... boring, again.

At my heart I am a writer and an artist. Li.P.S. as a showcase began to feel like a service more than a work of art. It was important for the community, important for the city, and important for how seriously people were willing to take spoken word, but how long are we supposed to be married to such duties? At what point does it cause you to stop being an artist and start being an organizer?

I don't have good answers to these questions, but I did know it was time to move on.

These steps were necessary and I'm glad to have the experiences I got from them all. They helped solidify my place in my local literary communtiy, made me untold connections, and jump started a career that might not be where it is without them. It also led to the point of this blog, my latest show, There Will Be No Haikus Here.

Sara Ali, a talented journalist in Buffalo, approached me with the idea early in 2016. "What if we put spoken word in an art gallery?" It wasn't a new idea. The Nickel City Slam operated in Buffalo up until 2008 and was housed in the Albright Knox. The difference was, this wouldn't be a slam, and it wouldn't be a showcase. Instead of emulating Def Poetry like we had with Li.P.S. this was a chance to go in any direction. And... that was scary.

And that was the crux of There Will Be No Haikus Here. I'll refrain from detailing the show because it wasn't recorded and there were very few pictures of the event taken. I like it that way. It was a pop up show that didn't benefit from months of promotion. It was at a DIY art space called Sugar City. It was the opposite of everything I'd previously done and it was incredibly satisfying. It was personal and only for those who attended.

Selling out bigger venues, embracing the vanity of being part of a brand, winning competitions, I enjoy these things. I won't lie. They're satisfying as well, but not in the same way. They're short lived highs. Doing something from the heart for fifty people who came with two days notice, solely for the love of it -- well, I'm still buzzing from it. And that is good.

It's been a while since we've last talked. Today I wanted to let you know why I've been gone for so long. The growth and arc of a career calls you to different priorities at different times. This blog was something I wanted to continue because it's been an interesting outlet to have a place to discuss thoughts as the process continues, but the more real world things that occur, the less I find myself here.

Work on the second draft of my first novel, A Bad Spot, is still underway. I was able to correct a big issue with my protaganist and the world of Rockland Lake continues to call me back. It will be a good day when I can sit down and finish up the last few edits to get it out to beta readers.

Since I've last been here I became a Teaching Artist at the Just Buffalo Writing Center. It has been a phenomenal experience and something that has allowed me to take a step back and really appreciate my craft and how far I've come in it. So far I've headed two workshops, Intro to Spoken Word and Writing Spoken Word. Sometimes you don't know what you think about something until you write it down. I'd add to that: sometimes you don't know what you think about something until you teach it. I've also been lucky enough to guest speak at over twelve local schools including public schools from elementary to senior high, and five colleges. Too many individual moments occured during these talks to get into specifics, but this has significantly changed the way I approach spoken word, who I'm doing it for, and why.

On the publishing front I've been able to stay in a publication every month from February to May in 2016. In February my Fourth Friday feature at Dog Ears Bookstore got some love from The Buffalo News. In March 'A Poem to Your Shadow' was published in The Karibu News. In April 'Periods Like Bullet Holes' was published in Artvoice and in May, four poems were published in Ghost City Review Vol 2. In June I was interviewed by Tamara Best, the Senior Staff Editor of Culture in the New York Times about the road to the National Poetry Slam. I was nominated for Best Poet and Best Local Writer again in the Best of Buffalo awards and to cap it all off I hosted my first pop up show in Buffalo at Sugar City. The show was called There Will Be No Haikus Here and you can read about it here --> http://www.dailypublic.com/articles/0...

All in all, even if I'm absent, I'm still at it. I'll be back with a decompression of There Will Be No Haikus Here and where I plan to take this new project going forward.

The first draft for A Bad Spot was finished in its entirety just over a month ago. Parts had been written two years ago, but the bulk of what happens to Nelly and Rodney Girard was put on paper in the last six months.

Since the project had enough time to breath in its crawl to completion, and given my editor was actually in town, we hopped right on the editing process and got to work turning draft one into draft two.

I detailed my thoughts on the work involved in the last post, so I'll avoid repeating myself, but now that over half the book is on to the second draft and the ball is rolling down hill.

Since first readers will be receiving their copies before thanksgiving I'll start to share small amounts of content in the coming posts.

Ben

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You start a story with a sentence and ten thousand words later you realize the characters had more to say and do than you expected. The next thing you know you're at twenty thousand words and a bulk of the really good stuff you've cooked up is still to come. And then three months (or six or eight or a year depending what your writing speed is) are gone and you've got a tight little sixty-five thousand word book. You didn't intend for it to go this way, but suddenly there's a novel and it's time to put up or shut up.

What are we talking about exactly? You've just finished a book, isn't it time to celebrate? Isn't it time to put your feet up and bask in the literary sunshine? Isn't it time to reflect on this wonderful journey?

Of course not.

You now have to begin the pain staking process of making sure the thing you've just put all this time into is worth it for someone else to pick up and give their time to. All you've managed to do is cut the tree trunk down to a significantly smaller log. Now it's time to whittle away until the only thing that's left is the sculpture you saw in your minds eye, down to the last detail.

And this is fair.

Really, it's how it should be. And it reinforces one of the main things I believe about the art of fiction (and writing in general). There are no lightning bolts (except for the ones there are. exception, rule, yadda yadda) that suddenly strike and leave us with the next 1984 or The Sound and the Fury. There are men and women that work day in and day out, scrutinizing every word to make sure their story and their characters are presented as clearly and honestly as possible. It's not the romantic vision of a notebook, a lake and pensive look. It's a blue collar job.

Finishing my first novel, A Bad Spot, was a big achievement for me. Unlike the examples I listed above it took two years, most of which was spent trying to convince myself it wasn't worth finishing. But, that's another post. What I learned, though, was that there was still much work to be done.

I look forward to this work. It's a big transition to move from the creative and take on the editorial process. Currently 6 out of the 20 chapters have had their edits applied and are on to the second draft. I'll keep the progress updated as I move along and start to share small excerpts. You can check back for blog posts on the process of A Bad Spot.

WRITER BEN BRINDISE

Ben Brindise is an award winning poet/writer who performs nationally and all over Buffalo and Canada.

MCL: Do you write prose or just poetry?

BB: I started writing fiction. I always wanted to be a novelist, but I started with short stories. It wasn't until I walked into Pure Ink two years ago that I ever considered writing poetry as well.

MCL: How did you get into poetry?

BB: A friend had just come back from New Orleans where he saw his first live poetry slam. When he came back, he searched and found Pure Ink here in Buffalo. He asked me to come with him and even though I had studied and grown an appreciation for the poetic movements in college, it was just... different. It was engaging and personal in a way it was hard for the page to match and I didn't think about it like a writer. I thought about it like a kid who just realized what a ball was for.

MCL: How did poetry slams come about?

BB: Poetry slams started in the 80's. However, how they came about is not nearly as important as why, so I'm going to redirect to that. At the time poetry features were exclusive. If you weren't "in the circle" than good luck getting a feature somewhere worthwhile or with any kind of audience. Also, readings were seen as formal affairs where the poet was the lecturer and the audience were their unobtrusive students. A poetry slam was created solely to break this structure. It was invented to create democratic environments where literally anyone could sign up to read. Didn't matter if you were a college professor, poet laureate, if you stumbled off the bus half drunk or any combination of the three, you could read. It was meant to create an inclusion of voices, not a silencing of them. It was meant to level the playing field. And of course, no one ever wants to get behind that.

MCL: What's the difference between poetry and poetry slam?

BB: What's the difference between dill and sweet pickles? Maybe that's not a good analogy. There is no difference. It's a misconception to think of "slam poetry" as a genre because "slam poetry" doesn't exist. A Poetry Slam isn't a type of poetry, it's the name of the competition. It's not Sports:Football. It's Football:Football Game. The people who participate in a Poetry Slam are just poets who write poetry. Some of those poems are able to be performed or would "do well" in a slam. Some of them wouldn't. The thing is, no one writes a poem with the competition in mind. Or, at least, they shouldn't. If they do it's comparable to writing fiction for the trend. If you do it people will know you're fake. They'll see right through you.

MCL: What makes a good slammer?

BB: Being a good poet helps. A lot. Outside of that there are things you can be aware of during a competition that will separate people who are basically the same at the top, but 'we do poetry for points, but the poetry is the point'. Meaning, winning a slam is arbitrary. You can have 23 slam titles. Who cares? Did you get better? Did you become a better writer, a better poet? If not, what did you really win?

MCL: Some poetry influences?

BB: Dylan Thomas, Bob Dylan, Eminem, James Joyce, Johnny Cash

MCL: What is it about those poets you find interesting?

BB: Some people reading this will see those names and roll their eyes, but each of those writers did two things really well. They said a lot and sometimes in very few words. They were, or are, their messages.

MCL: What's the Buffalo, New York scene like?

BB: I was new to it as of two years ago. I literally knew no one in the Buffalo literary community until I walked into Pure Ink in June of 2013. Two years later I get to represent Buffalo in Nationals, have been a part of a number of the biggest art festivals in Buffalo and get to play a large role in ELAB's City of Night this year. I say all that to illustrate my point: there is a ton of opportunity right now. You just have to show up and do the work.

MCL: Any local poets who helped you grow?

BB: Eddie Gomez, Solomon Dixon, Irving Finks, Brandon Williamson, Thomas Panzarella, Sam Ferrante

MCL: What are ome of your favorite venues and why?

BB: The Gypsy Parlor is up there. It kind of became a home to poets. They opened their normal open mic to us, let us do the slam there. I have a lot of love for that place. A close second is Shea's Smith Theater. They took us on for Living Poet Society: One Year Anniversary and it was a huge success. They made it really easy for us to make the most of our event.

MCL: If you could go back in time and be a poet when would it be and why?

BB: I know it's a novelty question, but I don't like it. I think there's something really weird in fantasizing about being a different artist in a different context. You wouldn't be you. Also, everyone hates the time period they live in. The grass is always greener in someone else's time period, as they say.

MCL: You recently won two Artvoice awards. Please tell us about them.

BB: Well, I won Best Local Writer and Best Poet, but... I don't know. It's done on votes, not quality of work. I'm not a super humble person, so when I say, "I think there are better writers and poets in the city" I'm not saying that to humble-brag or whatever weird term they use for passive-aggressively bragging, I'm just being honest. That being said, I got pretty drunk at the party and get to put those little labels on the resume, so that's cool.

MCL: Finally, promote yourself. What's going on in 2015/2016 for you?

BB: In the next couple months Pure Ink will be at the Elements Music Fest to support Hearts for the Homeless, we'll heavily involved in City of Night, we'll be at the Gypsy Parlor the second and fourth sunday of every month, as always and then we'll be heading to Oakland, Ca to represent Buffalo, NY in the National Poetry Slam (the first time Buffalo has qualified since 2008). Personally, I'll be teaching a poetry program at BASCS running from the last week of July through the first week of August. I'll also be out and about during Buffalo Infringement Festival. Because we're frequently adding dates and performances feel free to keep in touch with me:

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You can view the article here:
http://www.broadwayworld.com/buffalo/...

A few weeks ago I was offered the chance to run a two week poetry program that will span the last week of July and the first week of August. This is part of a summer program the school runs and the students who will participate register based on their interest in the program.

They requested two hours a day from 10am to Noon and gave complete creative control of the content, the lesson plans and the overall direction the course will go in.

Now that I've laid out the context... wow. I'm understandably excited, but always aware of how terribly this could go. Before I delve completely into insecurities of communication, garnering interest in the subject matter or just a general fear that I have nothing of interest to say to these kids, I'll stop myself. These are all natural parts of the process, and the body of work I've put together over the last few years, my education and general interest in the topic myself should leave me confident in my ability, right? Of course it doesn't. But I'm going to do it anyway.

Let's get down to one thing I'm planning on working into the program. As a young writer I had a hard time relating to the classics. I didn't want to read long, epic romance poetry. I found Plath dull, Whitman a bit self-serving and what was the point of all that stuff about red wheelbarrows? Looking back, my ignorance is kind of cute, but as a constant reader in my youth, why was it so hard to relate to these writers?

Because when we're young our scope is so narrow and if it doesn't fit into our life experiences, often it's not that we can't understand something, it's that we don't want to. So if Dylan Thomas doesn't fit into a fifteen year olds life experience (which, God hopes it he doesn't) we have to find the bridge between the two.

My thought, while not original, is to comb through my library of great hip-hop artists, indie bands, and classic rock to illustrate examples of literary devices, why they work and how they make the art better. Doing this will hopefully create the bridge we need to then move in to talking about non-contemporary poetry.

If you've taught a poetry class or program and have tried this or something similar let me know about your experience and what worked and what didn't in the comments.

Saying hindsight is 20/20 feels lazy and cliche, but let's be honest. Some things become cliche because they're true. Looking back on your old work, even work you've had published (therefore hold in a slightly higher esteem than the rest), can provide a treasure trove of area's of improvement.

It's hard, but as writers we must 'kill our darlings'. The problem is sometimes it's hard to separate the act of creation from the clinical scalpel a good editor is required to use. Omit needless words, right? But they're our words. To us, they're all needed.

Except they aren't. A reader may not need that extra line of description you think they do. They may not need that extra piece of back story. In fact, it may just bore them or take them out of the story. Now, we're talking specifically about fiction writing where our main goal is to create a suspension of disbelief. This may not be as important to a technical writer or a non-fiction writer where the goals are different, but to a fiction writer who is making it all up, keeping people in the story and making sure what they're reading is believable within the context of the world you've created, it's everything.

Below I'll point out a few examples in one of my own published short stories, 'Spare Parts'. This story was written seven years ago and published in a non-professional online and print-to-order publication (these details given to lower your expectations) so there has been enough separation from the process of its creation to look at it objectively. The examples I point out are ones I've found on my own and have used to better my current writing.

"She used to wake me up early on Christmas morning with a soft kiss on the forehead. We’d go into the living room, but before I could unwrap a present I had to shake the snow globe. A pair of Santa’s helpers took turns pushing up and down on a teeter-totter. The glass always held small orbs on the surface; the reflections from the tree lights swimming like fish. She said doing it made these times easier to remember. When I got older I found it was true."

On the surface it doesn't seem like too bad of a paragraph. Questionable comma and semi-colon usage, but it sounds true and honest enough. The real issue? It's clunky and immediately we're given more information than we need as a reader. This issue is alleviated by striking one line (ironically the line with the semi-colon, two birds one stone): The glass always held small orbs on the surface; the reflections from the tree lights swimming like fish.

We don't need it. It slows the pace down. It should have gone, but I couldn't pull the trigger at the time. These days I wouldn't hesitate. You shouldn't, either.

One more example to illustrate the point. "Mom hated it. She sat on her porch when I came over, drinking green tea and bitching rather then doing the gardening she’d waited decades to have time for. ‘Even-Reagan-wouldn’t-have-let-this-happen’ was her stance, but I didn’t see how it was the President’s fault. He wasn’t around for the years before when everyone was pro-off-shore-drilling.
Honestly, though, I lost interest in politics after I heard Palin say, “drill baby, drill”. If you can’t figure out why, I don’t have much left to say."

The first paragraph details both characters (the protaganist and his mother) political views rather clearly if not overtly. The follow up is just indulgence. And not needed. It shouldn't have made it through, but it did.

While this probably hasn't been a totally formed thought, I think it's still worth noting. We can always be improving and if you're doing it right - trying to be better than yourself - your own shortcomings are often the best place to start.