We begin this month’s selections with a short meditation on obsessive love, “Shards of Me,” by Jeremy Maddux.
A master of economy, he manages to pack more characterization, tension, and pathos in a single page than many other writers do in a dozen pages. It’s a pleasure to publish his work.
As a person who hasn’t had a drink in 25 years, I always enjoy a harrowing addiction story. J.J. Anselmi, in this excerpt from his memoir, Heavy, gives us booze and drugs and violence and rock-and-roll and, ultimately, the redemptive perspective of sobriety. This is some intense material, but an extremely rewarding read. Anselmi’s is an important emerging voice in the literature of addiction, and I’m proud to be presenting his work.
I’m also proud to be offering the wonderful “Reading Lolita in Hell’s Kitchen,” by Leslie Nipkow. The bio Leslie submitted is way too modest, even though it includes credits such as the New York Times, Salon.com, and O Magazine. Leslie is in fact a noted television writer who has won an Emmy for her work, and who has been nominated a total of five times for the Emmys.
I asked our editor-in-chief, Ken Robidoux, if this was the first time we were publishing an Emmy winner or nominee, and I was impressed (though not really surprised) to learn that this is the third time we’re confirming the good taste of the Emmy nomination committee. Poet Kwame Dawes has won a News & Documentary Emmy for Hope: Living & Loving with HIV in Jamaica, while TV writer/producer Sam Catlin has been nominated for three Emmys for the series Breaking Bad.
Writing, of course, isn’t just about winning prizes. Mark Wisniewski, in “Literary Bullying: Ten Questions and Answers,” explores a topic that is long overdue. Like most writers, I’m very sensitive to the subject. I’ve been a victim of literary bullying since about the seventh grade, I think. (English class, St. Jerome’s School, Westchester, CA, 1973.) In fact, I’m so used to being bullied by other writers that when Mark submitted the piece, I was paranoid enough to wonder why he was sending such an essay to ME, what was it about me that had pissed him off so much that he felt I needed to be bullied/enlightened/harassed about bullying? I came to believe, without bothering to read the essay, but with utter fanatical certitude, that my former thesis director had put him up to this stunt. Then I read the piece and was quite relieved to see that it didn’t have anything at all to do with me. Uhm, right, Mark? Mark?