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Oct 06, 2015 12:31PM
https://www.createspace.com/5090238When I Was a Dynamiter! Or, How a Nice Catholic Boy Became a Merry Prankster, a Pornographer, and a Bridegroom Seven TimesWhen I Was a Dynamiter! Or, How a Nice Catholic Boy Became a Merry Prankster, a Pornographer, and a Bridegroom Seven Times
List Price: $20.00
Authored by Lee Quarnstrom
Introduction by John Riley
Cover design or artwork by Geoff Melville
Associate editor Iris Berry
Former beatnik, former member of novelist Ken Kesey's famed Merry Band of Pranksters, retired journalist and one-time Executive Editor of Larry Flynt's notorious Hustler Magazine, Lee Quarnstrom has jammed a lot of living into just one life! Now available, his memoir "WHEN I WAS A DYNAMITER, or How a Nice Catholic Boy Became a Merry Prankster, a Pornographer and a Bridegroom Seven Times," is several fascinating, adventurous autobiographies packed into one.
Quarnstrom left home when, he claims, he discovered that his mother was the world's worst cook. Apparently seeking edible sustenance as well as excitement, he thumbed rides back and forth and up and down across the country - and Mexico - living and loving in some of the capitals of bohemia. His journalistic career started at age 19 when he covered the classic "Front Page" cops and robbers beats at the City News Bureau of Chicago. His stops as a post-Beat Generation, pre-Hippie beatnik included sojourns in San Francisco, Greenwich Village, Seattle, Mexico City and Kesey's remote home in the Santa Cruz Mountains above the Bay Area.
Writing about his peripatetic lifetime, Quarnstrom tells of rubbing shoulders and making friends with a wide spectrum of well-known writers and artists - such as Paul Krassner, founder and editor of The Realist, the late Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, poet Allen Ginsburg, death-and-dying spiritual counselor Stephen Levine, musicians such as Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia, and Neal Cassady, hero of several Jack Kerouac novels and driver of "Further," Kesey's psychedelically painted old school bus.
"WHEN I WAS A DYNAMITER" also recounts his ongoing sorrow since the 1982 fatal shooting of his 18-year-old son, Eric, near some of the San Francisco beatnik bars where Quarnstrom had hung out with other writers and artists and musicians.
And, when he was 18, Quarnstrom did in fact work as a dynamiter - blowing up stumps and boulders - on a three-man crew building trails and bridges in remote parts of Olympic National Park in the state of Washington.
About the author:
Lee Quarnstrom has asked his wife to order just one memorial word on his gravestone - Beatnik.
Born in a small Washington lumber mill town and raised for the most part there and in Chicago, Quarnstrom moved to the Bay Area in the mid-1960s in time to join the Merry Band of Pranksters, the acid-fueled crew aboard author Ken Kesey's psychedelically painted bus with "Further" as its destination and a warning across its rear: "Caution, Weird Load." With the musical Grateful Dead in tow, the Pranksters brought psychedelia to the west coast with their famed Acid Tests!
Prior to his move to California, Quarnstrom was a young Chicago newspaperman in the final days of the Windy City's old-time, "Front Page" journalism. Lucky enough to have read Jack Kerouac's ON THE ROAD before freeways replaced two-lane blacktop roads, he began years of wandering by sticking out his thumb and hitching rides back and forth and up and down around the country. Stops along the way included New York City, Mexico City, Seattle, a remote redwood canyon in the Santa Cruz Mountains, nearby Santa Cruz, and Los Angeles, where he was Executive Editor of the notorious smut magazine, Hustler.
Quarnstrom did, in fact, spend one summer felling tall trees and blasting boulders as Assistant Dynamiter on an Olympic National Park trail crew. And the woman he's asked to describe him on that tombstone is indeed his seventh wife.
Quarnstrom and his wife Christine, a poet, live with their pet Welsh corgis in southern California.
Publication Date: Nov 16 2014
ISBN/EAN13: 1940213983 / 9781940213989
Page Count: 428
Binding Type: US Trade Paper
Trim Size: 6" x 9"
Language: English
Color: Black and White
Related Categories: Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs
https://www.createspace.com/4696170Dead LionsDead Lions
List Price: $16.95
Authored by A.D. Winans
Introduction by John Dorsey
Cover design or artwork by A. Razor
Associate editor Iris Berry
A.D. Winans talks candidly in his own words about his friendships with such literary luminaries as Alvah Bessie, one of the Hollywood 10, Bob Kaufmaun, the renowned poet of the San Francisco Renaissance, Jack Micheline, poetic raconteur of the greatest magnitude, and Charles Bukowski, the legendary poet and novelist whose legendary shadow still causes much debate to this day. The history and storytelling are richly textured and masterfully woven into one book of magical nuances that come from being there at the time and in the moment.
Publication Date: Mar 06 2014
ISBN/EAN13: 1940213940 / 9781940213941
Page Count: 102
Binding Type: US Trade Paper
Trim Size: 6" x 9"
Language: English
Color: Black and White
Related Categories: Biography & Autobiography / Literary
https://www.createspace.com/5070844ScarsScars
List Price: $15.00
Authored by Nadia Bruce Rawlings
Introduction by Michele McDannold
Cover design or artwork by Geoff Cordner
Edited by Iris Berry
Nadia Bruce-Rawlings has written a collection of stories with a dark humor and candor that only someone with a survivor's gratitude can. She takes us on a journey that cracks open family secrets, illustrating the evolution of dysfunction from its very core. She reminds us, as children we do not get to choose our surroundings, while relying on our parents for protection, love, and nurturing, preparing us for our own adult journey into the world, and that more times than not, this isn't the case. Because parents get abused and scarred, by their parents who got abused and scarred, by their parents, and so on. And with each generation the trauma grows, becoming a collection and a reflection of an ongoing tradition of generational abuse.
This book is written based on Nadia's experiences on the front lines of her own personal battles with child abuse, domestic violence, molestation, addiction, crime, cutting, incarceration, and recovery. After hitting a bottom so hard with only two options left, life or death. Nadia drives home the sad and brutal truth that not everyone gets that choice. Many do not live to tell. This book is written for them, an epitaph. This book is also a love letter and a promise that there is hope for a better life, written for the ones that are still out there, still fighting their way in, and not out, who have lost their way, and still collecting scars.
About the author:
Nadia uses grains of her often, gritty life to infuse her stories with cathartic realism. Her stories "Fire" and "Scars" have both been finalists in Glimmer Train's writing contests and are included here in SCARS, her first anthology from Punk Hostage Press. Nadia Bruce- Rawlings grew up travelling the world and living in various countries before settling in Los Angeles. In LA she briefly worked at a vitamin factory and then began a long career in independent film distribution. A single mom for 11 years, she and her new husband have settled into the Nashville area, where she writes by the lake when she can escape their five kids and two dogs.
Scars
Publication Date: Oct 24 2014
ISBN/EAN13: 1940213002 / 9781940213002
Page Count: 102
Binding Type: US Trade Paper
Trim Size: 6" x 9"
Language: English
Color: Black and White with Bleed
When I Was a Dynamiter! Or, How a Nice Catholic Boy Became a Merry Prankster, a Pornographer, and a Bridegroom Seven TimesHigh Times, Santa Cruz Good Times Reviews Lee Quarnstrom's latest memoir...
http://www.gtweekly.com/index.php/san...
Stealing the Midnight from a Handful of DaysAn Interview with Momma, aka Michele McDannold
http://blotterature.com/2014/07/18/bl...
Dreams Gone Mad With HopeS.A. Griffin blogging it out at the Open Ended It...
http://carmabum.blogspot.com/
Yvonne de la VegaYvonne de la Vega at the LA Poetry Examiner
http://www.examiner.com/poetry-in-los...
Oct 06, 2015 11:43AM
Hollie HardyThe Write Stuff: Hollie Hardy on Being Brave, Diving In, and Making Connections
http://www.sfweekly.com/exhibitionist...
https://www.createspace.com/5392804No Parachutes To Carry Me HomeNo Parachutes To Carry Me Home
List Price: $15.95
Authored by Maisha Z Johnson
Cover design or artwork by Geoff Melville
Edited by A. Razor
Maisha Z. Johnson's elegant meditation on human difference, No Parachutes to Carry Me Home, opens with an epigraph from June Jordan's On the Black Family --
we came and we come in a glory of darkness
around the true reasons for sharing
our dark and our beautiful
name
As though in direct response to this testament, readers are introduced to the compassionate speaker of the opening poem Sacrifices who will guide us through the book and the life of its protagonist. This neighbor-- the book's witness-- describes the unsmiling stone face of an angel on her stoop and the anonymous sacrifices that are lit and left at the angel's feet. She concludes:
i like to imagine these sacrifices
as somebody's secret - someone
who spends his evenings making promises
to his family. nights, asking my angel for the same.
The narrator of No Parachutes is not a shadow spying from behind the curtains, but a woman who goes forth each day to imagine the suffering of others not so different from her own.
We partake in one initiation after another, as she moves from the loss of a young girl's magic marble to her first sexual experience with another woman. Throughout there is a dialogical tension between external and internal reality which the speaker must true the way one true's the bubble in a level or the sharpness of a blade.
i knew the answer
to the true or false question,
and i knew my answer-
the two were not the same.
From mr. lowell's religion class, st. mary's high school
And she knows that her answers are not without consequence:
god sat at the edge
of my desk, her gray dreadlocks
dipped in ink black as my pupils
There is a humorous counterpoint, a leitmotif that runs through the book, surely the voice of the superego reminding the narrator how she might be perceived by others. These poems are all titled the people say and the people say things like black girls don't do yoga. The people say black girls don't kiss dogs. Black girls don't have eating disorders.
And yet we know, like the speaker in the poet's chosen epigraph by Gwendolyn Brooks from a song in the front yard, Maisha Z. Johnson will not be shaped by what the people say, nor will she be detoured by her own mistakes. She will move from the front yard, from the boredom of the beautiful, to the untended out back.
I've stayed in the front yard all my life.
I want a peek at the back
Where it's rough and untended and hungry weed grows.
A girl gets sick of a rose.
Gwendolyn Brooks, a song in the front yard
She will explore her parental homeland with nostalgia and curiosity.
i wish this map would show
where the queer girls go. in places
of pretending those girls don't exist,
they hold each other
somewhere, perhaps in plain sight.
A reader cannot help but love the narrator of this first powerful collection of poems as she enters one life, then another, from Trinidad to Oakland, and approaches each with her great gifts of simple clarity , lyric beauty and humility--
me, carrying only my gentle breath beneath
loose jeans and a baggy black sweatshirt.
Sandra Alcosser, poet, A Fish to Feed All Hunger and Except by Nature
About the author:
Maisha Z. Johnson is writer and editor living in Oakland, CA. She has an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University and she studied creative writing at San Francisco State University. Maisha works at the intersections of creative arts, healing, and social change. She's also the author of Through Your Own Words: 51 Writing Prompts for Healing and Self-Care, as well as three poetry chapbooks: Split Ears, Uprooted, and Queer As In. Her work has been published in numerous journals, nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, and won awards and competitions including Literary Death Match, The Lit Slam, and the Leo Litwak Award.
Publication Date: Jun 29 2015
ISBN/EAN13: 1940213835 / 9781940213835
Page Count: 106
Binding Type: US Trade Paper
Trim Size: 5.5" x 8.5"
Language: English
Color: Black and White
Related Categories: Poetry / Women Authors
https://www.createspace.com/5392797No Greater LoveNo Greater Love
List Price: $12.95
Authored by Die Dragonetti
Edited by Alexandra Naughton
Associate editor A. Razor
Cover design or artwork by A. Razor
"Die Dragonetti is a luminary in a wasteland of online writing, transcending all of his contemporaries and paving the way for the digital poet as performance artist (a task many have attempted and only Die has accomplished). Like Chris Kraus, Michelle Tea, Eileen Myles and Kathy Acker before him, Die is a writer who not only calls to be remembered, but celebrated: an icon who at once embodies what it means to be a true radical and yet nonetheless is still poised for cultural canonization."
- Katya Ungerman, playwright of "La Vita Rosa"
About the author:
Named a "queer lit luminary" by Flavorwire, Die Dragonetti is an angel boy, co-editor of Be About It press, through which he co-founded Empathlit and curates the series In Fear of a Trans Planet, and contributor/social media manager at Enclave. In addition to No Greater Love, he has another chapbook of poetry, Tangier (2012). Find him on the internet @angelboyangelboy on Tumblr and @_dieangelboy_ on Twitter.
Publication Date: Mar 29 2015
ISBN/EAN13: 1940213827 / 9781940213828
Page Count: 76
Binding Type: US Trade Paper
Trim Size: 6" x 9"
Language: English
Color: Black and White
Related Categories: Poetry / LGBT
You Could Never Objectify Me More Than I've Already Objectified Myself by Alexandra Naughton
(1 new)
Oct 05, 2015 05:52PM
https://www.createspace.com/5392782You could never objectify me more than I've already objectified myselfYou Could Never Objectify Me More Than I've Already Objectified Myself
List Price: $12.95
Authored by Alexandra Naughton
Cover design or artwork by Geoff Melville
Edited by A. Razor
"Alexandra Naughton's poems are subversive, honest poems. They are in the spirit of resistance to dudebro culture and beefpizzle literature. This bookis a heartless and utter rejection of the white cis male death grip on all our lives."
- Dena Rash Guzman, Life Cycle (Dog On A Chain Press, 2013)
About the author:
Alexandra Naughton might be here or probably not and can't decide which is better. She is known for I Will Always Be Your Whore/Love Songs for Billy Corgan published by Punk Hostage Press, 2013. Her other titles include I Will Always Be In Love (Dig That Book Co., 2015), My Posey Taste Like (Bottlecap Press,2015), and tsaritsa of the wired.
Publication Date:
Mar 30 2015
ISBN/EAN13:
1940213800 / 9781940213804
Page Count:
62
Binding Type:
US Trade Paper
Trim Size:
5" x 8"
Language:
English
Color:
Black and White
Related Categories:
Poetry / Women Authors
https://www.createspace.com/5392793Introvert/ExtrovertIntrovert/Extrovert
List Price: $12.95
Authored by Russell Jaffe
Cover design or artwork by Geoff Melville
Edited by Alexandra Naughton
T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and Walt Whitman: these are some of the planets "Introvert // Extrovert" forced me to think of. Yes, the voice in "Introvert // Extrovert" is large and complicated. It is generous and compelling. It is filled with contradictions, planets and LOVE. It is filled also with strange darknesses, but these, shrewdly and honestly, are displayed most nakedly in dreams only. I bring up T.S. Eliot because the voice here forces me to.
Forces me to because of the sexual agony. Forces me to because of the way Social Media, through the sad and brilliant brain, is measured out in dull lightning bolts like and a la coffee spoons. T.S. Eliot because of the grime, the parking lots, pizza, death by drowning, and other fast-food rubble. T.S. Eliot because of the way the universe gets crumpled down into a ball. And, of course, in T.S. Eliot I am bringing up (am forced to bring up) all Art dating back to and including the strange animals ritualized on ancient cave walls. I bring up Dylan Thomas because Russell forces me to. Forces me to because of the way he moves in and out of the universe. Dies away, humanly and insignificantly, underneath it.
But, more potently, draws the universe (the planets, the stars, and the darknesses) into himself. I bring up Whitman because Russell forces me to. Forces me through sheer joy and insistence. Forces me through scale and cosmic rocking. Whitman, of course, will not let you go. And Whitman of course, for all his human indecencies is grounded in LOVE. I am forced to bring up Whitman because Whitman is also the great poet-masturbation-God. You might object to my invoking three male poets here and ask "What does this say about the work of Russell Jaffe??" And here I'll just quote Russell Jaffe:
I like can't even deal w the patriarchy right now
I don't know why Russell Jaffe hasn't blown up yet. It seems inevitable.
-RAUAN KLASSNIK
About the author:
Russell Jaffe is a junior high teacher at The Chicago Free School and formerly-maybe someday again-was Co-Editor and MC/coordinator of Strange Cage, a chapbook poetry press and reading series. He is the author of the poetry collection This Super Doom I Aver (Poets Democracy Press, '13) and a few chapbooks. His poetry and articles about art have appeared in a bunch of journals. He's currently a proud father, contributing writer for Queen Mob's Teahouse (queenmobs.com), and 8 track collector.
Publication Date:
Mar 30 2015
ISBN/EAN13:
1940213819 / 9781940213811
Page Count:
104
Binding Type:
US Trade Paper
Trim Size:
6" x 9"
Language:
English
Color:
Black and White
Related Categories:
Poetry / Epic
Stealing the Midnight from a Handful of Days https://www.createspace.com/5112603Stealing The Midnight From a Handful of Days
List Price: $15.00
Authored by Michele McDannold
Introduction by Bill Gainer
Cover design or artwork by Kari Spencer, James Griffin
Edited by Iris Berry
Michele McDannold's, "Stealing the Midnight from a Handful of Days," is the recollection of a young women for whom each moment, breath, event of the day is trapped in memory. She greets sin as common, sorrow as an ally and joy as a mishap. Her poems are elegant in the telling of her innocence. It isn't that she hasn't seen the dark side, or been touched in undeserving ways. She has. Somehow she has embraced these moments, allowed herself to dream big and has stepped beyond the constraints of a mid-west up-bringing. Michele's poems come from those deep places, where secrets hide and she writes them with a fearless heart.
Publication Date:
Nov 19 2014
ISBN/EAN13:
1940213010 / 9781940213019
Page Count:
144
Binding Type:
US Trade Paper
Trim Size:
6" x 9"
Language:
English
Color:
Black and White
Related Categories:
Poetry / Women Authors
About the author:
Born in Jacksonville, Illinois, Michele McDannold grew up in the nearby village of Meredosia, population never more than 1200. She has lived in west central Illinois most of her life except for one year in Las Vegas and a short stint in Nebraska.
Michele started writing poetry in grade school and maintained a connection with writing as an occasional pastime and coping mechanism. It was not until her early thirties that she began pursuing her poetry seriously and seeking publication. Since then, her poetry has been published in a wide range of print and online publications and anthologies.
Having only recently returned to a university to further her education, Michele's writing style is self-taught, developing over time and life experience, aided by a "sick" love for books. Her poetry tends toward the narrative-daily and life observations told in colloquial speech. Her perspective comes from that of a marginalized artist struggling with poverty, mental illness, motherhood and society's expectations of a woman and wife living in a small Midwestern town.
Michele is no new comer, she has been and still is an active participant in the small press community, making a huge impact for a number of years now. She was the Editor-in-Chief at "Red Fez Publications" for over five years, and in her own words, "for about as long as the most awesomest director Leopold McGinnis could stand for it." She is the founder of "The Literary Underground" a grassroots effort committed to supporting independent artists, promoting diversity in creativity and fostering community in the small press communities. Michele is currently the editor/publisher for "Citizens For Decent Literature Press", actively working on the "This Is Poetry" project with co-editor Brian W. Fugett of "Zygote in my Coffee" and proud as hell to have published the book of poetry "Random Acts of Terror" by Luis Rivas. In her spare time (haha), she helps Catfish McDaris out over at "Ppigpenn"--a literary arts blogzine, and those folks over at "Blotterature Literary Magazine" pretend to listen to the rambling on occasion.
Michele currently resides in Jacksonville, Illinois with her two teenage children and occasionally her wayward twenty-year old child. She is a full-time student and does a massive amount of hustle to keep the dream alive. Her cat's name is Ghost. He leaves her dead things as "offerings."
https://www.createspace.com/5130609Thugness is a VirtueThugness Is A Virtue
A Teacher's First Year in Juvenile Hall
Authored by Hannah Wehr
Cover design or artwork by Geoff Melville
Edited by A. Razor
List Price: $16.95
Add to Cart
About the author:
Hannah Wehr has spent seven years teaching poetry, creative writing, and Language Arts in juvenile correctional facilities throughout California. She has spent six years as a performance poet, college lecturer, prison poetry panel member, and is the recipient of awards from the Los Angeles City Council for her assistance in the creation of The Hollywood Institute of Poetics. A contributing author to "What I Know Now: Writings From Inside" from Stanford University and author of "How To Start a Writing Program for Incarcerated Youth", Hannah lives in Northern California where she teaches English, Classic Film, and Drama at a juvenile detention facility in the Bay Area.
Thugness Is A Virtue
'Hannah Wehr presents a bleak, scorchingly funny, to-the-bone account of her first year working in a juvenile detention center. Ostensibly about her teaching experiences, the book is also a stinging indictment of the entire juvenile prison system that repeatedly fails young inmates. Hannah makes compelling arguments for stripping down, re-defining and re-organizing the system. Read these young students' stories. Hear their voices. Be prepared for your heart to be broken and filled and broken and filled again. Hannah Wehr writes from the hip: an unsentimental, direct, clear and essential voice.'
Publication Date:
Nov 28 2014
ISBN/EAN13:
1940213991 / 9781940213996
Page Count:
244
Binding Type:
US Trade Paper
Trim Size:
6" x 9"
Language:
English
Color:
Black and White
Related Categories:
Education / Experimental Methods
Apr 07, 2014 02:24PM
Apr 07, 2014 02:21PM
