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Issue #15 Cover and Contributors

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Issue #15 publishes Feb. 1 (which is also when submissions to Issue #16 open!). It will be our first issue distributed by our new distributors Magazines Canada, which means Into the Void will be stocked at independent and Chapters/Indigo bookstores nationwide. We’ve also teamed up with a new printers based here in Ontario and the print magazine has never looked better.

Issue #15 is an excellent and eclectic one of stunning pieces from a diverse group of writers and visual artists. As always the print run is limited and will sell out.

The contributors to Issue #15 are below, and the evocative cover art pictured above is “White Orchid” by Ontario-based Liana Russwurm.

FICTION

Kate Felix
Alec Hutchinson
Kevin Rippin
Charlie Scaturro
Grace Q. Song
Brendan Stephens

CREATIVE NONFICTION

Nishat Ahmed
Rachel Sussman

POETRY

Nicholas Alti
Derek Annis
Nico Antuna Cooper
Matt Duggan
Katherine Fallon
Robert Manaster
Samuel Mangold-Lenett
Ed Meek
Kathleen Naureckas
Brian Rihlmann
Keith Stahl
Josh Stewart
Scott Strom
Ann Thomson
Jim Trainer

VISUAL ART

Jodie Day
Mairead Dunne
Martina Furlong
Sasha Giniger
Theodore Heublein
Mars Lauderbaugh
Aimee Melaugh
Chalice Mitchell
Liana Russwurm
Ben Ryan
Spyros Verykios

REVIEWS

Sly Bang by Larissa Shmailo reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
That Summer by Robert Cooperman reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp

INTERVIEW

Writers-in-Conversation between Randy Nikkel Schroeder and Niall Howell


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Writer’s Block #2: The Jot

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“Lose not thy thought
Be sure to jot”

I lost a photograph the other day. I meant to fasten it to the wall in my new apartment and must have set it in a place I’d normally never have put it down. It might have been a drawer, a shelf, on the floor. Inside a bag, locked in the trunk, next to the bed. I looked in each of these places repeatedly until cursing and resignation set in and then acceptance: I lost it.

That same thing can happen to your writing. Maybe you’re on the bus zoning out and the thought hits you, a lovely idea for a poem or the perfect plot point in your story. It might not even be an idea. It could be one line. An interesting word. The way the man across the aisle is scratching his chin. The striated lines on the bus floor. The blur of trees out the window. The one pink house along a street immersed in gray. Lovely. And you tuck it away for later, just late enough that you’re liable to forget it. For that line, moment, feeling, that pink house, might I suggest: the jot.

For years, writers have been keeping a tiny little notebook tucked into their pocket. Joan Didion is a wild note-taker. Hemingway was a real notebook guy. Look up any writer and you can find allusions to notes. Not the ones they write when they’re sitting down to write, but the notes writers jot on notebooks that they carry around with them when they’re not writing, per say.

In her 1968 essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” Joan Didion says that much of note-taking and keeping a journal in general is about how things made her feel. “How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook. I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write—on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest . . .”

Portrait of Joan Didion by Mary Lloyd Estrin, 1977.

Didion goes on to quote lines from overheard conversations, to describe in very minor detail the places in which those conversations took place. She concludes that her true reason, much of the time, in keeping a notebook is not that she will open her book and find the perfect line, the perfectly composed paragraph, but to capture the feeling and the character. “But of course that is exactly it: not that I should ever use the line, but that I should remember the woman who said it and the afternoon I heard it.”

These captured moments can be the jumping off point for an entire story, a novel. Just recently I was walking past a bar in San Francisco and saw a man holding his stomach in great pain, it seemed, then he turned to another fellow who stood nearby smoking and said, “He lived, though,” before retching between two garbage cans. What could it mean! The moment stuck with me all night. As soon as I got on the train I wrote down a few lines, descriptions, the intersection. Now that man is forming into a character and that street into a scene. And since I made a quick jot, that moment is especially embedded deeper in my mind and will stay with me even if I don’t ever look at the physical note again. Why? It’s science, baby.

This isn’t a news flash, Walter Kronkite. For years, researchers have been looking at the connection between forming memories and handwriting notes. We actually remember something more clearly when we’re pen-and-papering. In 2014 a study was conducted by Pam Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel Oppenheimer of UCLA Los Angeles (published in Psychological Science) that looked at note-taking styles of students in our digital times. Essentially their study found that when we’re taking notes by hand versus rapid-fire typing on the keys, we’re more likely to be better listeners and choose the most effective keywords, rather than to slap away at the keys and capture nearly verbatim what the professor is saying.

“And there are two hypotheses to why note-taking is beneficial in the first place,” the study says. “The first idea is called the encoding hypothesis, which says that when a person is taking notes, ‘the processing that occurs’ will improve ‘learning and retention.’ The second, called the external-storage hypothesis, is that you learn by being able to look back at your notes, or even the notes of other people.”

Of course, this study applies to taking notes in a lecture but this can apply to literary note-taking as well; jotting, if you will. It seems that Didion’s theory aligns here, too: when we’re writing down only the key moments and key lines—rather than to try and capture an entire scene—we’re forming deeper connections with those moments, with feelings and settings and life.

When I’m interviewing musicians, I always record the interview for fact-checking and quote-pulling, but I always take physical notes. Almost every time, those keywords and lines I scribble down make up the meat of our interview. In fact, one time I accidentally hit the timer function on my phone rather than to record a voice memo (I’ve since moved up the rookie scale and purchased a digital recorder). After the interview was over I had a private moment of angry panic when I realized what I’d done. But! I’d taken such “key moment” notes that when I sat down to write the interview it turned into a hearty narrative with less quotes, more descriptions and only the juiciest moments.

So back to that bus ride. If you’re continually jotting your notes—the pink house, that chin-scratcher, the striated lines—you can look back on them when it’s time to sit down with your work and have a crisp starting point for your next scene. You’ll, as Didion says, remember how that person or moment made you feel, and isn’t the work of a writer to evoke feeling and connection with others? If you’re more connected to the work and can see it in your mind’s eye more clearly, you can create better work, and if you always have your notebook, you can be more in tune with the world around you, ready for those jots.

Of course, you may never read some of those notes again and many of them won’t turn into anything. But put a little notebook in your pocket. If you’re already doing so, don’t forget it’s there. The jot can not only save you from forgetting a key item—like that dear photo—but it can create lasting connection and feeling and inspiration from an outing as simple as a bus ride.


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The Coarse Grind: Part 21: The Way Through

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I look back at everything I’ve done and think, it worked out OK.
—James Williamson

I’m just a lucky motherfucker.
—Michael Harriot

If I tell you what I’m doing today
will you shut up and get out of my way?
—Joe Jackson

11/26/19, 7:39 a.m.

Yo. Trainer here. Strange to be writing on a Tuesday morning but it’s strange to do anything at this hour. If I’m doing anything at this time of day I’m conscripted to which doesn’t make this any less peculiar. Having to write is different for writers like me, I mean, I have a deadline so it will have to get done but I’m not writing for a paycheck or under the gun and anyway under the gun of what a paycheck has become living under capitalism. We’ve cages long and wide in this country and privilege has kept me in roses mostly, considering how they do almost everywhere else in the Final Century. It’s too early to get political and too early for anything else but I’ll take it, with the schedule I’m on, and write when I can, thankfully for longer and longer sessions these days and just after sunrise on a weekday will have to do when we both know I’d rather be burning it at dusk or hid away from the business of the square world and during thee hated work week. As far as having to write this at all, I've made a life of writing to understand and as a refuge, so I only have to write this column in as much as I need to make sense of things or get away from it all for a while and be here with you and isn’t that nice?

I’ve been attempting to integrate the end of the world. I’m keen on the efforts of Roy Scranton and, by extension, meditating not only on my own death but the death of us all, like a samurai. Typically and all too human, I’m getting my set together for some filmed performances at my book releases this month, in Austin and Portland, conversations with the audience, soliloquies or stories, as I like to call them, and poems—some classic, old pieces and ones that are brand new. My performance will be about the end—of the human experiment, the Anthropocene, this Rome with cars, you me and the gimme gimme gimme Age. At the back of my mind I’m wondering why I’m still at it—the life and the Art and betting on the muse, but, even if there was an answer, I’m too busy to hear it. Turns out there’s no question when it comes to Art and I guess it’s taken the final clip of this last epoch to truly understand that, and all the more so writing this on a hated Tuesday morning.

If the world is going to end doesn’t concern me anymore because it’s already ended. The why shouldn’t matter either and would only hang me up on my way to acceptance. Why the world ended won’t stop or change what’s coming now. I’d rather not pay attention anyhow as I’ve got my own row to hoe and a ludicrously breathless and booked-to-the-teeth schedule to uphold. Ultimately, if and why just don’t matter to me. Truth is that we did this, anyway, Good Reader, you and I. But even if we weren’t to blame what would that matter? We didn’t heed the call 30 years ago and we’re not going to do anything about it now either, because we’re human and we don’t want to think about our own death and certainly not the end of the human race. This is where the challenge lies, where my work is—literally and spiritually. I’m trying to integrate and maybe even refute a different and more complex and weighted why—the why of Art, the why of work and endeavor and I am not talking about the J-O-B or what they’ve deemed we have to do to survive. It’s heavy, Bubba, this why and I answer it wordlessly every day when I get up, punch a clock and make it home to these columns and posts. Every hated Tuesday morning I’m up with the neighbor’s dog barking and drinking coarsely-ground holy dark roast with honey. My why is the same as it ever was. It began in a high-ceilinged 1-bedroom at 45th&Locust at the end of the American Century, and ends right here, in this incredible loft apartment uptown in the live music capital of the world. Typing, typing, always typing. Banging it out and getting it down like I was shown by the priceless and profound example of Uncle Hank Rollins. Writing as the way through and always, no matter what, getting it down. Get it down as the world roils and then when the world starts to fall away. I’ve my why Good Reader, spiritually anyway. I need to get it on paper though and on the tongue and the breath. I’ll be talking to you under the hot lights soon. My performance needs to be as important as death itself. Because it is. So, I’m at work. All by myself. On an overcast Tuesday morning while the world is away at their day jobs and the human clock mercurially winds down to dust. I’m sitting here typing. What else?

 

In 11 years global temperatures will reach catastrophic level.  Jim Trainer’s 6th full-length collection of poetry is on sale now through Yellow Lark Press.
Become a Patron—join Jim as he treks down the savage road of Personal Journalism and receive premier access to live recordings, drafts, poems and letters, a dedication in his next collection and a signed copy of his entire library.

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Writer’s Block #1: Never Stop

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A few years ago I was working at a literary salon in Oakland, California. That night I was in the kitchen, tackling the daunting and skin-wrecking task of washing the many dishes from that evening’s rush. As I pulled on a pair of pink, cloth-lined gloves and dipped my rubbery hands into the scalding water, the owner came around the corner and told me the open mic host couldn’t make it that night. “Any chance you can take over?” she asked with a nervous chuckle.

Our open mic had never been a huge affair. A few dozen people would shuffle in each Monday to read their latest poem, an excerpt from their novel, perform a song or tell some jokes. The audience was calm and quiet and seemed supportive enough. Bored, at times.

“It starts in like twenty minutes,” she said rather sheepishly. “I can take over those dishes,” she added, pointing.

Fair motivation. I de-gloved. I shoved a wiry curl behind my ear, smoothed my shirt and asked, “What am I supposed to start with?”

“Eh, just start talking,” she said with a smile.

Here is the pause in the story where I turn around, look at the camera and say, oh hi. Didn’t see you there. We’re here today to explore the art of writing. Or rather, the art of getting yourself into the seat and pen-and-papering it. I believe that the concept of writer’s block is a myth, or at the very least, an excuse. This week, as I wrote this, I connected with Adam Johnson (Orphan Master’s Son, Fortune Smiles) and asked him if he had any anecdotes about moments when inspiration hit, of getting unstuck. Any insights into the tough spot we call writer’s block.

“The Orphan Master’s Son” by Adam Johnson.

He said, “I don’t have much to offer as the only way to prevent writer’s block is to never stop writing.”

So what does that actually look like? The never stop writing thing? We have to remind ourselves that writing is like jogging: it’s hard to get started but the more regularly you do it, the more in shape you’ll be and the easier it’ll be. Every day. The tools are simple: joggers need their shoes and a road; writers need a pen and paper. Or in our times, of course, a keypad and electricity. It’s a simple concept but the hard part is getting asses in the seats, so to speak.

We have to carve writing into our schedules; to make it a habit and to not stop in that beginning phase when the habit is hard. That can take weeks, months, but once that routine is built into your life and the writing is on your mind daily, the words will come easier, the stories will form more fluidly. It’s not always fun but it’s always rewarding when you hit that stride. For me, the project I struggle with most is my second novel. The habit I’ve formed in order to write that novel is to wake up at 6 every morning and before starting anything else—copywriting work or my next article or answering emails or even talking to anyone—I write. Without fail, every weekday morning. I never write on weekends because I consider my novel work, because I take it seriously.

Before I started getting paid to be a writer—which has taken years but alas, here I am—a professor told me that I needed to stop thinking about when I will be a writer. You are a writer, already, she told me. You just have to take yourself seriously. You don’t have to ask for permission to write, nor to call yourself a writer. But you do have to give yourself permission to craft your life around it. No one will take it seriously if you don’t. Look at your calendar. When is the best time to make your daily habit? Maybe it’s early in the morning before work, at lunch time or in the evening. What sacrifices are you willing to make for it? Maybe you lose an hour of sleep, miss out on some TV or late-night social events but the more you’re exercising that writing muscle, the more present your characters will be in your mind; poems and songs will start to buzz around in your head and when it comes time to sit down for your daily routine, those words will be there ready to connect with the ones from the day before.

That night at the literary salon I flipped the mic on, allowed my boss to dramatically lower the lights, shine a spotlight. I tapped the mic and as ironically as I could I said, “Is this thing on?” Laughter. Claps. I gave a meager introduction to the first performer and she sang a folk song about her dog. I returned to the stage, made a joke about dogs and love songs. More laughter. Claps. The night went on. Performers hopped on stage and off. I didn’t know what I was doing but I started it, kept going. I realized how much I enjoyed the act of hosting, of cracking jokes and making comments. I loved how the audience was reacting and I still can’t believe it but the old host never returned and I ended up hosting that open mic for almost two years. Every Monday. And it started with my boss saying “Eh, just start talking.”

Just start writing. Don’t stop. Even a Pulitzer Prize winner couldn’t think of better advice.


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The Coarse Grind: Part 11: Year’s End Blues

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. . . thoughts inside my head get lost inside the haunted house . . .
—Ryan Adams, “My Wrecking Ball”

for Shanti

The Year of the Cock’s been beheaded. It’s run to ground after last throes running round the barnyard spurting blood up to the sky in a fountain. Chicken Little is dead and the sky has fallen down. The pundits yap and yammer, but underneath those tired tropes and yarns on the wire, and beneath the heads of steam and blather from the President and Congress, is the reality we’re all being fed. It’s all a line and will be until journalism prevails and otherwise propaganda and sloganeering. In far less ominous tones, the news is only entertainment. We’re the worst part and by we I mean you and me, Brother. Sister. We’ve taken to this complicit role stationary. The News and outrage culture is how we distract ourselves. The world is a cold and dark place where the rich get richer and the poor are stripped of healthcare or die in a border jail, and we watch it all from a screen.There are more perfect exemplars and warriors of true journalism than me out there to go at it—this diaphanous and quarreling mass, and pull out whatever spark of truth can be garnered from the New Century. Even when no truth is gleaned, the work of these great intelligences is to our benefit. What I mean is no answer is an answer and that’s heaps better than what the masters want us to hear. It’s all a line they’re feeding you while they’ve got one hand in your pocket and the other on the strings. I’ll leave politics to those who do it well and I’ll stick to the inner life, report on the strange and grisly turns I’ve been taking in the Night Kitchen and otherwise report on the findings of an intronaut, if you will—let you know I’m still struggling and the struggle is real.

I’ve lost someone dear to me but nobody died. She didn’t move away or find somebody else. The truth is, she lost me and it was to depression. This column and posts at Going For The Throat are approximately a highlight reel and I’ve no compunction about that, either. Victories should be celebrated. Especially for lifetime sufferers of a depressive disorder. Negative self talk can reach debilitating levels, can run round and rampant in the mind and make you ashamed and feel awful about the past while leaving you in no shape to do better. Depression is as real as a black hole—it's got no bottom and the quality of its darkness is in worldly tones.Everything seems real until it’s not. You think your feet are on the ground until you realize you’re falling. I’ve mastered nothing and gone nowhere if, at the end of the day, with five collections published, I can’t discern when laying on my love seat for five days is a bad choice, or even a choice at all, and anyway what I prefer over the sweet, laughing company of a woman I adore. Loss is our greatest teacher here and I’m writing you, today, December 30th, just before the New Year with tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat. There’s a world map, screwed to the wooden fence in the carport, I can see from here. I drilled in the bottom corners at an angle so the screws wouldn’t jut out into the neighbors yard and scrape the snouts of their mutts. The result is the thing is getting blown out, sagging and waterlogged and the world is slowly sliding into the mud of the drive—getting heavy in the rain and anyway heading for the ground.

I don’t do Best Ofs and it’s not because I’m too cool. I’ve had, in turns, my head in a hole between listening to new releases from DOG Power, Winter Dust, Eddy Dyer, Protomartyr and re-releases from The Sweetheart Parade and Archers of Loaf. I haven’t read enough to rightly consider myself an informed writer. Anxiety and depression won that round. I wrote about the same beat and track I always pander and putter and I’m thankful for the work. The bottom of this tentative-at-best offering of The Coarse Grind has dropped out. I feel the familiar racked and curling fingers of dread, pulling up at me from the gut, phantoms very real and eager to swarm and strangle out any good feeling I’ve found writing this and spending this time together. Whatever. I’ve written my way out of depression enough times to consider it a career and work towards that end in 2019. I’ve become the columnist I always wanted to be, however different this beat is though. Uncle Hank‘s out there like a punk rock Twain, stalking the territory with a camera and restless mind. Doc Thompson banged on the doors of high offices closed to the people and he got in with a keen attention to detail and the utilitarian wisdom of an outlaw. Papa just reigned in his own way, deep in the solitude of his radio nights typing and his genius was the simple yet profound line. At least that’s how it looks from here.

I’ll never know the affliction these men suffered and they’ll never know mine. We only have their highlight reel, as sturdy and useful and joyous a torch that it is. They’ve got their blues and I’ve got mine. I’m still breathing and better. I’m still putting out work into the world. To read back over these columns is to know at once how vital those beat dog hours were, clinching on the day labor/night writing circuit. How bleeding and cutthroat it had to be which of course is overwrought and romantic and perfect for the written word—point is, looking back and all we can glean is vainglory. We forget the pain and as well we should. But not completely if only because our pain won’t forget about us. It’ll rear and choke out what we thought was our life. It’ll kill the rooster and chop off his head. If I could sum up why I hate formulaic essay-writing it would be the closure it offers and that I need so bad. See, this is where I continue my beheaded Year of the Cock metaphor into a pithy homily about chicken soup or sucking the marrow out the bone. Truth is, this year, Art has won the round and I’m happy and proud about that and in great appreciation and awe of you for helping me make that happen. Something else has won though too, and that’s depression. It’s made its presence known, set me to rights, sure, but not before it took someone I hold very dear. This of course is for you, Good Reader, and to another year pulling our heads out the oven and for her—whom I’ll have to treasure in my own private and solitary way, alone.


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The Coarse Grind: Part 8

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I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. The great affair is to move.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes

Hence the enlightened ruler is heedful, and the good general full of caution.
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War

There’s no reason I can’t have 600 words on wax by noon every day. Oh but there are, many to several niggling detail and fuckarounds of daily life that can take the mightiest and most disciplined writer out the game. You can’t prepare for chaos but you can plan on where to be when lightning strikes. That would be here, good Reader, in the War Room in the writer’s chair. With the door open to the carport, the traffic on the highway streaming by, and the coffee cool and honey-sweet. My stovetop percolator churns out the good stuff. I load it with about a cup and a half of water and three heaping tablespoons full of black Italian roast, coarsely ground. I add honey to cut its bitter zing so when it cools it’s oh so nice. I committed journalism last week and it felt right but without daily writing on the dais I’m struck as dumb at the horrors of the New Century as you are. A tremendous boon to the writing life and being prepared is getting your arms around the gruesome and shocking detail of the dark spinning world, framing it and putting it in its place.You either hang yourself or you hang it on the wall. Integration is a wonderful byproduct of the writer’s life. The journalist should write as he/she thinks, at the cusp of the news cycle and before things get spun out and made do by the outrage culture of the reckoning world. A gut take is a great way to strengthen your voice, a safe way to find out what you think and a pure and uninfluenced catharsis.

There are large swathes of my day that could be lost in the thrall of a roaring anxiety or just spent fucking off. Fucking off is hardly a waste of time if you’re prepared. With preparation, you’d be surprised how little of an impending deadline is actually clutch. Several turns of phrase and rhythms of text in this very column have been tested, tried and true, in blogs and letters and poems that I write on a fire engine-red IBM Selectric II. I’m always pleased when poetry makes its presence known in my prose, both because I am in love with language and as an affirmation of its power. Poetry can dive down deep or just be and often, beautifully, it’s the same thing. Bukowski wrote that the mark of genius may be the ability to say something profound in a simple way. Hunter Thompson said that reality is far more twisted than what we could ever fear or imagine. Bob Dylan of course sang you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows and who knows how many countless iterations of that sentiment has come from the throats of as many punk rock singers since. The Wisdom body knows while the Reptile mind reacts and the legacy press panders to it. Salacious stories appeal to our fight or flight instinct. An identifiable enemy assures we’ll be too busy duking it out with each other in the streets to topple them in their tower. This is assuming a top down model of the press and an undemocratized media but ultimately proves the power of language, its power to incite or beautify and I am in love with it.

I am the living mind you fail to describe
in your dead language
the lost noun, the verb surviving
only in the infinitive
—Adrienne Rich, “The Stranger”

I write creative nonfiction and commit journalism for the sake of poetry and I write poetry to mine for the truth. If I could only throw my hat in fiction’s ring I’d rule them all. Not that I’m great, good Reader, or even good—God knows. Some posts at Going for the Throat have me cringing terribly, sometimes stealing from the madding crowd to scroll through my phone in the corner, gnashing and micro-editing as life passes me by. Point is, if you’re in love with language then bad writing can be just as inspiring, especially if it’s public. Bad writing is the best reason to sitcho ass down and get to work just as much as great writing can be a torch in the dark. Ask Heath Brougher. You’re not missing much by stanchioning yourself there but you’d be missing everything if you’re not getting steeped in the inner life.

There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside of them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.
—Herman Hesse, Der Steppenwolf

You owe it to yourself to step down that path good Writer and you owe it to the world to share what you discover. The world that we know is ending now, and that world is a world of power over. Get your power from within. A typewriter is a magic machine. It can create fortune and craft rue as it rolls out the road to the inner life, savage and lush with bloom and strangling tendril.The wild within is the best game in town. There are perverse and dark things buried there that need redemption. Take to the territory, good Writer, get charged with quest and invest long hours on the sinking throne. The world needs you. You need you. Don't save the world. Save yourself.



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The Coarse Grind: Part 7 – So You Want to Be a Writer

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New Journalism

Christmas Eve ’95 I slept in Cromwell Park. I’d been thrown out of my Mom’s for not having health insurance. It needed to happen. And the rest . . . I suppose. What happened was I fell through about five years of daylabor and shitjobs, another five as a mad Boehme, three on the getting-sober circuit and shit, about three years working down here in the Pearl of the South. What also happened is I decided to be a writer. I had to be, as clichéd as that sounds. I was working a string of jobs that were boring the life out of me. I dealt with it the only way I knew how—with a typewriter and booze.

One of the first things I did when I got to Austin was get a library card. Checked out Locked In the Arms of a Crazy Life, a biography of Charles Bukowski by Howard Sounes. It was profound for me to discover the great poet had started writing poetry at the age of 35. I was 34.  Another thing I did when I got down here was pitch to Verbicide Magazine and write blues legend Steve James a letter, saying hello and asking for an interview. Those first months in Austin were a fertile time, days and months planting seeds and business cards. It was like I landed, dropped my bags and said, “In 3 years I will be a writer.”

Then I got a job. Then I got laid off.  I stayed on unemployment way past any reasonable amount of time, and fell sadly short of my goal of becoming a writer in three years. I had to go back to work. It was one of many crises of doubt I had experienced, going all the way back to being homeless in my hometown in 1995. I wanted to be a writer. I landed a live-in gig, in a big yellow mansion inconveniently located off West 6th. A perfectly annoying backdrop and foil for the phase of my life I proudly announced as “being a writer.” It was the being a writer period, the being a writer time.

This introduction and this column are dated. It was originally written for the PLOG, the blog of Austin-based arts collective RawPaw, who featured a poem of mine in their inaugural issue back in 2014. I could never live down the influence of my writing heroes and I share this column about their inspiration and my process to pass the torch. Allow this retread good Reader, and allow me to bring it back for you. Tell you how I got here and that I’d like you to join me. In the late night or in the bright morning, I’d like you to join me on the savage road—this is the new stuff—join me in celebration of this new media, this new age—this moment. Let’s do some shit. Send our signal out into the hungry land. Let’s send out a song of love, or better—let’s send ’em some anger. Let us burn.

A Tale of Two Hanks

I always wanted to be a writer. That’s not to say that I always knew I wanted to be a writer. It is to say that for decades I had wanted to be a writer, but only actualized it, and felt like one, when I started writing a blog. The ineffectual and fuckall years of youth are too many to count and, besides—it depends on who’s counting. If it’s the inner critic, I don’t want to know. That bastard. Too many times he’s shut me down. Told me I ain’t shit and that I needed to get drunk if I wanted to be like Papa (Bukowski) or lift weights if I wanted to be like Henry Rollins. The truth is I always wanted to be a writer but I didn’t know how. I mean I always journaled, but—did that count? Hopefully any writer reading this has felt the power of it, the magic of writing. In 20,000 Days On Earth, Nick Cave discovers that he can control the weather with his moods simply by writing about it. “Now if I could only control my moods,” he sullenly adds.

Today’s installment of The Coarse Grind is a very Zen offering, so bear with me and don’t let me off the hook. Too often lofty advice is given for the reader to pore or fawn over while the writer’s slipped out to the alleyway to get paid and hail a cab. Same goes for Spirituality. The truth about spirituality is the same as the truth about writing. Both seem equally impossible, utterly unglamorous and something entirely different than our ideas about them.But both also are redeemed when you consider that their road is the only road and that’s the one we are on, good Reader. That if you want to be a writer you must write. Simple, right? Perhaps. Do consider what can keep you from writing. Or worse—what can take the inspiration out of it until distractions become disasters that can physically keep you from writing.

I don’t need to tell you. You know your weaknesses and I know mine. The only thing that will keep you going back, sitting down and spending more long hours on the sinking throne is if you like what you're doing.Old Hank B. said it must come shooting out of your fingertips, that if it’s difficult then don’t try. But old Hank R. would probably say the opposite: It must be hard, it must be painful, because you are a no-talent nobody who must get up hours before everybody else to be on par. Now here comes the Zen so hold on to your seat. Today’s Zen of writing moment is brought to you by The Boss: “Be able to keep two completely contradictory ideas alive and well inside of your heart and head at all times. If it doesn’t drive you crazy, it will make you strong.” There you have it, your religion. Your dogma? “Writing is the art of applying the ass to the seat.” You can thank Dorothy Parker for that one along with her priceless and biting contribution to the world of letters.

Those twenty-odd years when I wanted to be a writer? I knew I would be published when I first saw a copy of Rollins’ One From None. I knew it ’cause he knew it and Uncle Hank showed us how. Also (and here is why Bukowski is my Papa and his contribution to literature can never be underestimated), Papa told me that I could be a poet. I could write from where I was at. Which is right here, in my chair, in my house and from within the circus of my mind. Twenty-six years after first seeing a copy of Rollins’ book and twenty after reading Papa for the first time, I started a blog. Then I knew it: I was a writer.

Becoming The Media

I finally knew I was a writer when I started writing a blog. I won’t get into the saga of a backstory behind it but I had tapped into a medium that was immediate and honest. I had, or felt like I had, an instant audience. I’ve always looked at writing like performing so blogging really gave me a charge. The way you feel right before you go on stage. Super, all too, human. From that saga of a backstory I will offer this: my heroes have taught me well. My heroes were on the outside and they broke in. The rules didn’t apply to Hunter Thompson which was hardly always glamorous.

This will not be a recipe for how to be a successful writer, at least not the accepted definition of success. Do consider however, if you want to be a successful writer, one who gets paid, then you must write. Have a system or M.O. that you know will keep you writing. Willing. Enthusiastic, even.The thing that keeps me writing is my interest in it. Sadly, what is of most interest to me is myself and nothing else. In fact, current events really bum me the fuck out and opinion pieces are odious. It all feels like programming to me, and it just swirls into a hulking barrage of sights and sounds, horrors and “truths” that I must isolate myself from. Thank God for writing because it has become my refuge from the dark spinning world.

My point is why would campaign manager Frank Mankiewicz attribute Hunter Thompson as “the least factual, most accurate” reporter on the Campaign Trail in 1976? And, why are we finding out now that this country was dragged into war under false pretenses, that the freedom we were fighting for was only being taken away from us by those same warlords, when we have a free press in America, and reporting is held to a high standard of objectivity and truth? Without the internet or a distant relative living in the middle east—without Twitter, for Christ’s sake—we would have no idea what the Arab Spring was about. Well, we’d have some idea but probably a spun one, provoking a reaction that could then be reported on until it was true. I started Going for the Throat as the Arab Spring started rumbling, just as the stanchions under memorials to dictators were giving way in parks and plazas and out on the street. I’m not a journalist. But I am a reporter. And that, good reader, is the magic of writing.

None of these are reasons why after almost twenty years on the daylabor circuit I knew I was a writer. I know that I’m a writer because I write. I don’t ever not write. And it’s all because I have found a medium that is as inexhaustible as it is exhilarating. I have instant material simply by getting out of bed in the morning and with the click of a mouse it’s out there with all the “real” journalism. I have stepped into the Arena. I’m up there in the hot lights with all the shit-savvy polished faces and grim intellectual voices of news media. Is what I write true? Better believe it. Or, don’t, and start your own blog. You’ll thank me later. I hope to get a follow from you because that will mean you have begun and I will know you have arrived.

 

Part 6



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Best of the Net 2018 Nominees

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It’s with great pleasure that I announce the following excellent writers as our nominees for Best of the Net 2018:

FICTION

Jeff Ewing – “Ice Flowers” (Issue 7, January 2018)
Mark Brazaitis – “The River” (Issue 8, April 2018)

CREATIVE NONFICTION

Stephanie Dickinson – “Maximum Lock: Tasting Snow in the Universe of Lock” (Issue 8, April 2018)
Dacia Price – “Sexual History of a Girl” (Issue 7, January 2018)

POETRY

Raquel Vasquez Gilliland – “The Tale of the House of Vasquez” (Poetry Contest 2017)
Melissa Weiss – “Josef the Pigeon Poem” (Poetry Contest 2017)
Jensen McRae – “On Almost Loving an Activist” (Poetry Contest 2017)
Brendon O’Brien – “Sharing Our Bodies with Gods” (Poetry Contest 2017)
Susan L. Leary – “Reverberations” (Issue 8, April 2018)
Helena Mariño – “where the ocean” (Issue 7, January 2018)

Be sure to check out their pieces through the links provided and find more of their writing in other publications. Fingers crossed!


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Philosopher Eugene Thacker Sighs in the Face of Everything in ‘Infinite Resignation’

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“Life sucks. Then you die.” When my father first uttered these words, they were not meant to be depressing or sad. He was merely stating a fact, hoping that my siblings and I would understand that life would hurt no matter what we did. This fact became a family motto of sorts, something uttered whenever major or minor tragedy struck, a maxim we could all rely on to get through whatever happened to be ailing us. After reading Infinite Resignation: On Pessimism, I think Eugene Thacker would agree with this axiom.

Thacker’s newest book is at times infuriating and maddening, but is also brilliant in its premise and construction. It is broken into two parts—”On Pessimism” and “The Patron Saints of Pessimism.” “On Pessimism” is a litany of aphorisms, short, almost staccato musings, and passages both illuminating and haunting, all trying to explain pessimism as philosophical. I use the word trying not because Thacker fails in this task, but because he admits early on that it is an impossible task. After all, how can one separate the bad attitude inherent within pessimism from its more philosophical qualities? To answer this question, Thacker asks another: “Do not all philosophies stem from a bad mood?”

Towards the beginning of “On Pessimism,” Thacker adequately outlines both what is wrong with pessimism and why it should not (and cannot) be dismissed so easily: “We didn’t really think we could figure it out, did we? It was just passing time, something to do, a bold gesture put forth in all its fragility according to rules that we have agreed to forget that we made up in the first place.” He is speaking of philosophy in general, presenting pessimism as both a refutation and recognition: a refutation of all possible answers, no matter how ridiculous or logical they might seem; and a recognition that no answer that can be conjured up by finite human beings will suffice for any of the questions that have plagued our species for the entirety of its existence.

The aphorisms themselves range from several pages long to mere sentence fragments, sometimes sounding angry, other times bitter, and most of the time morose. The “bad attitude” of pessimism seeps out of each and every one of them, a contradiction Thacker acknowledges without reveling in. It is this acknowledgement that makes the whole work profound, his knowing that these little scraps of insight can be read and interpreted as little more than frustrated musings of someone who has lived one too many shitty days, while at the same time rending into bloody strips much of what we would consider philosophy. These aphorisms clarify thoughts recorded in earlier works, specifically the idea that human knowledge has a horizon or limit, by deconstructing conventional wisdom, showing that the ugly parts that make up the uglier whole of philosophical inquiry are but specks of dust and that there is a very real possibility that all thought is all for naught.

He opens “The Patron Saints of Pessimism” by admitting that he is unsure of the best way to catalog thinkers that make up the pessimist school of thought (if such a school can be said to actually exist). So he opts for the hagiography, noting that the hagiography is not akin to the biography because they are not comprehensive or chronological. Instead they “highlight particular moments in the life of a saint, but they do so in an anecdotal, almost haphazard way.” This sense of uncertainty in how best to proceed with this section is indicative of Infinite Resignation as a whole, Thacker often mired in indecision because he knows that any answer he proposes is suspect, that it can be picked apart, that it will not suffice.

While I enthusiastically grappled with this book, trying hard and failing to keep up with the wildly intelligent philosopher that wrote it, both he and I would admit that it is not a book for everyone. Infinite Resignation belongs on the shelf next to the likes of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, thinkers that Thacker quotes extensively, and it deserves to be studied and debated by rigorous students of philosophy. Thacker is the kind of thinker that should be high on the list when future generations are compiling collections of philosophers of the early 21st Century that need to be studied. I can only hope that he is not lost to obscurity like many of the patron saints of pessimism and only discovered long after his death.

Infinite Resignation is not an easy book to read, but show me a book of philosophy worth wrestling with that is not also difficult to examine and study and I will call you a liar. Like all great works of philosophy, this book will force readers to question their long-held beliefs in the way the world works and the way the world ought to work, but it’s brilliance lies not in a combative kind of prose or a holier-than-thou style; Thacker’s voice is quiet, a desperate whisper into the void that is both haunting and heartbreaking, a resigned sigh in the face of nothing and everything that evokes empathy and understanding.

A part of me wonders what Eugene Thacker would think of my family’s motto, that he would likely agree with it. But he would probably add something to it, something akin to life would not suck at all if we had never been born in the first place.

Buy Infinite Resignation: On Pessimism (Repeater Books, 2018) here.




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The Coarse Grind: Part 5

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In the years before my death I was an antichrist . . .
– KJV

 It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids.
– HST

Well. The months have blown by, in turns sweet and savage, and the fate of The Coarse Grind depends on bringing you up to speed, Good Reader. I lost the job that made writing an impossibility and I found other work. The state awarded me Unemployment Benefits and I really took to writing then. I even got back into the journalism business. Take To The Territory hit the stands and then I hit the road. A week before I left, the state took my benefits back and now say I owe them $1,300. My month on the dole was incredible. I was steeped in the work and joyfully volleyed between this column, 9-or-so hundred words bi-weekly for The Flake News, at least 600 every week at Going For The Throat, and letters, of course, still on my iPad or stuffed into stamped envelopes in my road bag and ready to send. Wisdom is the marrow of life, it’s why we endure any number and kind of thorny to-do and fuckaround—we come through by wearing through, with pearls or cannonballs of wisdom and we know we’ll survive or die though nothing much will matter if we do. Not our striving, not our passion and certainly nothing we’ve learned will matter when we meet the dust. Until then, the wisdom is the why ain’t it though. Why you’ve blessed us at Into The Void and The Coarse Grind. You gave us the number one commodity under the sun—your time. And I won’t forget it. Readers like Michelle, who found my and James Kelman’s words precisely when she needed them most. That is Art’s true utility and it’s better than blood. All said the only Wisdom I can offer from the months that’ve passed since we last spoke is that I got fired and it was one of the luckiest goddamn days of my life.

I suppose my benefits disappearing as quickly as they appeared should mean that I’m yours again. I’m at the mercy of the grind and wondering how my Art will survive and I can manage to keep the muse by my side while I’m scraping paint off floors and serving Creole brunch in the Bywater. Another benefit of getting off the dole is the fact I can offer you full disclosure, which is all I’ve ever trucked, at Going For The Throat and otherwise. I always want to give you the real because their love is cursory and the world is flim-flam and the dream of a democratized media has wafted like a fart in the wind. The truth is simultaneously nowhere to be found and exactly what you want it to be. Dylan Roof found all the reason he needed to murder nine in cold on the Internet, and 63 million people continuously find a way to say they’re not racist while remaining completely racist. The Arab Spring has cooled down and it’s getting harder to be poor anywhere in the world. American hegemony and disaster capitalism should roll on through and put the pincers on the New Century. Anything triumphant about the human spirit will be eclipsed. It’s too late for punk rock and it’s too late to pretend. We’ve seen the wires and the magician’s drunk. They kill you out on the street and they kill you in school.

What does all this have to do with me and you and The Coarse Grind? The end of the world as we know it is the through-line, a thread of doom that runs from these cherished hours penning this column and hated days working for the man to you and your plight doing the same. The challenge of creation is a question of sustenance. My body is breaking down and my time ain’t long. I’m sore and unemployed and the exploitative employer’s market we been trapped in since the Great Recession has only gotten worse as the screws of authoritarianism more tightly turn. If I don’t find the right work I’ll die miserable like so many generations of Trainer men have, but at the end of the day I’ll still be writing it down—coming through with 6-900 words everywhere from a garage apartment in Wilshire Wood to CC’s in Mid City to a Brussels hotel room or Eco village outside Sofia.

I didn’t realize that not knowing what to write about, and not having a job or income, would be such a boon. Writing this has helped me realize some things. That still works at least. I still have my faculties. The long hours on the sinking throne can still yield some growth into Wisdom. Hard times here and everywhere have brought us close, Good Reader. They’ve brought us here and as grisly and heinous as this moment in time can be, it’s better than any pie-in-the-sky or fantasy life anywhere else. You bet. I’ll see you on the streets motherfucker. It’s where we’re at our most vulnerable and our hearts are pumping blood. As jaded and worn down and over the Facebook cognoscenti as I am, and as inured with world politic and disgusted and terrified as I can get by the Americans, I still believe in us. As long as we are writing it down our story is being told.The songs of the street will be ours when we walk ’em. Our love will be greater staring this 21st Century shitshow down. If they loot us and break us and they swoop in to usurp us then we’ll report on that. Run and tell that homeboy. He who is lost to this world is free to conquer one of his own.They can have their world but this media is ours. If the kids are united they shall not be divided.

Keep in touch.

Ab irato,

Your Writer,

Jim Trainer

Please visit jimtrainer.net for a hand-printed and perfectly bound copy of Take To The Territory, Trainer’s latest collection of poetry, out now through Yellow Lark Press.



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