These Books (by Chicago authors) Will Change Your Life, Part Two - Volt by Alan Heathcock and How To Hold A Woman by Billy Lombardo.

Read and travel and travel and read and hit Chicago authors repeatedly all week. And hit may be the operative word, well, one of any number of operative words when it comes to Volt by Alan Heathcock, who we should note is a Chicago native, now Idaho transplant, though we will claim him in perpetuity, and How To Hold A Woman by Billy Lombardo, both of which come out swinging in some fashion and don't let-up. Not much anyway. And not until their respective books stop. Not end, there's no end for these characters, just a point where the stories stop. For now, and for the reader, though not for them. Both books also do a masterly job of building something larger from smaller parts. Lombard's joint is a novel in stories, stories as fragments, stories about how one family falls apart, blow by blow, and piece by piece, until, maybe, possibly, re-building again. It is crushing, but it is also knowing, which makes the feeling of being crushed all the worse. 

It may be we are bringing our biases and preferences to the table here as well, and when aren't we, but as great as it all is, and it is greatness, Chapter Two, "How I Knew You Were Mad At Me," says everything that needs to be said about how quiet and distance enters a once vibrant relationship. How it is little things that pile-up until they are not little, just painful and sad and there is no end in sight. Heathcock goes another way, stand-alone stories that are not entirely stand alone, as he crafts, or is it creates, and what a fertile, detail-loving eye Heathcock possesses, a small town called Krafton and the endless violence, fear, and loss that permeates the lives of the people who live there in ways both insular, and not. Because even in small towns where everybody may know something about everyone else, you can't keep the natural, or larger, world, at bay. Things don't work like that. They can't. And like all relationships, things once vibrant can go dark and quiet just like that. All of which may be sad and like a punch a face, or gut, but be it Volt or How To Hold A Woman, makes for riveting, and yes even, life-changing reading.

Interview Sundays are back. And Knee-Jerk sublimeness.

So happy to have Interview Sundays back in the house. Doubly happy we are the interviewee. Self-absorbed we know. Triply happy for said mostly-magical interview to appear in the always awesome Chicago-based Knee-Jerk magazine. And fourthly happy that said interviewer is the always lovely Lauryn Allison and that in fact this is quasi-part two to our earlier interview in the Barrelhouse. That's a lot, and yet, there is one more thing you should know, Knee-Jerk's 2011 Essay and Chapbook Contests are nigh, and upon us, so get on it, submit, feel the Knee-Jerk love, and maybe, just maybe change you life. Nice, right? Way.


Mine too. I went to school for writing and the community was very tight, so there was this sense that a success for one was a success for us all. But I always felt like it was important not to lose sight of the fact that it’s a competition on some level too.

It is a competition. It’s funny you bring that up because it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. It is absolutely a competition, but I think we can use that as a springboard. For example, Alan Heathcock, whose short story collection Volt came out about a month or so ago and has just fucking blown up. It’s really hard for me to articulate how excited I am about that, even though I hardly know him. To me, he’s a guy who was swinging at the fences for a long time and writing great stuff, and now he’s getting national recognition. So, top of the list: that’s awesome. I’ve met him and he’s great, so that makes me even more happy. He’s a dad writer, so you know—

Check it. Ludlow. Dogzplot. And the alt.punk.

There are a number of books we are looking forward to reading these days, Volt by Alan Heathcock, Daddy's by Lindsay Hunter and The Bee Loud Glade by Steve Himmer, among many, but there are few books we are as excited about as alt.punk by the quite stellar Bay area rocker and author Lavinia Ludlow, who happens to have just been interviewed at Dogzplot by another author who has a book coming out we are also much excited about, Barry Graham and Nothing or Next to Nothing. Nice how that all comes together, yes? Yes.

BG : For me, ALT.PUNK is a tale of brutally honest, fatalistic, twenty-first century American Naturalism. I can’t help but feel that Hazel’s entire existence is preordained, that her germophobic, socially inept personality and her narrow, semi-elitist world view were shaped well before she was conceived, and a job at Safeway and her frustrating habit of returning again and again to the same deadbeat boyfriends are all part of her inescapable destiny. Tell me why this is or is not a good assessment?

LL: You couldn’t have assessed the protagonist in a more anal, undignified, and dysfunctional manner. It was dead-on. I’ve always wanted to write a story about a bitter and jaded suburbanite putting down the unproductive complaining and taking action. My intent was to instill melodramatic teenage angst into a character that was well into adulthood, and put her in the middle of a dark-humored fast-paced entertaining novel. In this story, Hazel tucked balls into her big girl panties and got the hell out of her dead end lifestyle. Naturally, without meticulous planning, everything blew chunks in her face.