Join Me For a Bublish/Twitter Chat

What is Bublish? It may sound kind of like a brand of gum, but it's actually a "social book discovery platform" whose president, Kathy Meis, has been tireless in her enthusiasm and support for authors. I feel like I owe her and Bublish a debt, having uploaded two of my books to the site and created four of what they call "book bubbles," all at no cost other than the effort it takes to create them. Anyway, take a look and see what you think. This is what a "bubble" looks like (click to enlarge):

The reason I'm directing your attention their way is that they've asked me to take part in something called a Twitter Chat this Thursday, September 12 at 3:00 pm Eastern Time (Noon Pacific) and I would love it if my friends and those who have enjoyed my writing in any way, shape or form could show up and ask me deeply bizarre or even eminently sensible questions. It might be fun, kind of.

It's an odd coincidence that this is happening on September 12, given the subject matter of Dissolute Kinship, but I suppose it's fortuitous. If by fortuitous I mean weird.

To join the party, go to Twitter and you will need to include @BublishMe in your tweet along with the hashtag #bublish. And then I suppose you'll ask me directly, so my Twitter handle is, fairly unsurprisingly and most unimaginitively, this: @DavidAntrobus

See you on Thursday if you can make it. I'll be on my best behaviour and no jokes from me about nuns or garden gnomes or even yoga pants. You, however, can go wild.

Update: Given today's date, I created a new book bubble at the site, which you can see here. It's a short reflection on the interconnectivity of our species, through the joy and tragedy common to us all. (Also, click on image below.)

The Art of Leaving and Arriving

For a blog entitled The Migrant Type, this article ("All Immigrants are Artists") at The Atlantic has a special resonance.

While contemplating Patricia Engel’s It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris, the gloriously-named Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat encounters the idea that "re-creating your entire life is a form of reinvention on par with the greatest works of literature" with the same sense of astonishment I also felt when reading the article itself, let alone the novel that sparked it. As an immigrant, I'd never considered the act of migration a creative one, yet in the sense of reinvention Danticat outlines, there's a compelling and even romantic case for it.

Her interpretation of Engel's novel reveals the enchanting idea that art need not reside in the mythic clouds but can (and perhaps should?) live among real people in the practical world of survival. As she writes—in a sentence that had me nodding my head vigorously—"I’ve never seen anyone connect being an artist and an immigrant so explicitly, and for me it was a revelation." Yes. In a world in which immigrants are treated with suspicion and even hostility in many of their host countries, this was hidden in plain sight all along. And fittingly, it takes an artist (or two) to articulate it. Speaking of which, I want to give the last word to the writer of the source novel, since this short quote is simply lovely:

"[A]ll immigrants are artists because they create a life, a future, from nothing but a dream. The immigrant’s life is art in its purest form."

The Lonely Room

Every Friday, JD "Dan" Mader opens his blog, Unemployed Imagination, to impromptu flash fiction writing, a generous gift to his fellow writers. Whether you participate or lurk outside admiring the entries, it's always a fun playground. This week, I started a piece and it kind of took over and, embarrassingly, it went way beyond the two minutes of allotted time. But it said something slightly different about something frightening and sad, in a way I hadn't captured before, so I thought I'd better reproduce it here, edited slightly, on this poor neglected blog of mine. So, here's "The Lonely Room":

It's like being trapped inside a dirty white room with only one door: the glare of the fluorescents scratches your corneas; the random, rhythmless drip of a tap somewhere keeps you from sleeping or even relaxing. The lights make dying electric sounds. There are things in the dim corners; terrible things. You wonder if the room will run out of oxygen. Your heart rate picks up, tethering itself to this new anxiety. But then it in turn goes away; you forget to be scared and wonder instead whether you're already dead. Then, there are the scenes on the stained walls, projected by a pitiless torturer known as nostalgia: happy scenes that feel like they could sever your aorta; once-shining things now like shards. They cut and you bleed. You are in this room every day. For weeks. Months. Bleeding, in appalling pain or feeling nothing at all. You must be dead, you think. Then, one day, of no particular calendrical significance, you stand and look through the single dirty pane of glass and see a small boy walking by and another child on a bicycle is riding like a neutrino in a collider toward the first child and you think some terrible cosmic catastrophe will occur, but the boy spies the bike and sidesteps it, and…. that is all. The threat is past, has passed. You once knew how to do that and now you know again; you know to ready yourself for the assaults, that they will be coming—of that you can be sure—but you can roll away, use their momentum, sidestep them, remove their sting, deflect the worst. At which point, astonished, you realize the door had never even been locked.

Writers Helping Writers Helping Others

Yes, I know. It's been a while. Quiet down. I'm here now, aren't I? Anyway, I have a couple of pimping promotional duties to attend to, awkwardly constructed blog post title notwithstanding.

First off, the indefatigable Morgen Bailey featured me in her latest author spotlight, and for her pains received a volley of flagrant, barefaced lies. I really shouldn't be allowed out. You don't have to read it. Not only do you get a very shady bio, but you get my muddled, opinionated drivel about genre versus literary, a completely inessential way to pass this Fourth of July.

Coincidentally, I am (we are) also featured on the website RABMAD, which is a handy acronym for Read A Book, Make A Difference. The site showcases writers whose books contribute in some way to a cause or charity, which is why they graciously chose to feature Seasons. Since there are four authors, none of whom is predominant (even the order on the book's cover is not only chronological but also alphabetical, whether you use first or last names), RABMAD will feature each one individually when they collate all the info.

Well, that's it, I think. Leaves me with a last big shoutout to everyone (like Morgen Bailey and Rob Guthrie) who selflessly promotes writers on their websites. Your tireless work is appreciated even during those fraught moments we forget to say thank you.

Seasons Now Published

If there were such a thing as a Writer Genie, I'd only have one wish to ask of it: please make me more prolific. Actually, that's not true. Since childhood, I've urged every character in every tale to ever feature the standard three wishes to simply ask for an infinite number of wishes, but to no avail. Why doesn't anyone ever think of that?

Ha. But anyway, where was I? Oh right. Prolific. You've heard the phrase "verbal diarrhea," right? Well, I suffer from the polar opposite. Consonantal constipation. In short, I need a lexicographic laxative.

But today, thanks to the efforts of some fine colleagues, I and those very same compadres have (to mercifully change the metaphor) added a few more blocks of ice to the glacially expanding edifice of our written output. The story behind Seasons is as serendipitous as the stories within Seasons, if that makes sense. At some point last September, a story about a troubled young woman wrestling with self-destructive impulses appeared to me almost unbidden. No doubt it emerged from a subconscious filled with the real life horror stories of young people who are so often dealt a cruel and arbitrary hand before they're even born. "Summer Long" is a difficult character study, dark and anxious and fearful. But I think it said what I'd needed to say. Then a chance exchange in the comments section (you can read how it all unfolded here) resulted in a chain reaction in which Edward Lorn, JD Mader and Jo-Anne Teal each began to add a new, related story, a season at a time, until we ended up with this delicately balanced quartet of tales poised between oblivion and redemption.

And now, you can buy the collected stories for an insanely low price, and better yet, know that 100 percent of the royalties will go to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Yeah, the four of us won't see a single penny. (Which is good, as half the authors here are Canadian and pennies are now outlawed in Canada. It's true.)