This Podcast Will Change Your Life, Episode Ninety-Two - Fantastic Orphans, starring the Mike Joyce.

Quite Mike Joyce we are. Not to mention  Chicago journalism, Literary Orphans, bars, podcast sandwich eating etiquette, Adbusters, punk music, American Skin, bookbinding, Nelson Algren, and our current obsessions with being Jewey and Dan Sinker. So do hit it, it just might change your life.

New joint. Caught Off Guard. At the Literary Orphans. Thankful we are.

Truth. There is Caught Off Guard. It is Literary Orphans and it is stellar line-up. So many thanks to the Mike Joyce and the whole Orphans crew for that. It is also Four Fathers excerpt. Which is nice. Excerpt? Word.

"There is a flash of red hair like fire, or cinnamon, and it shakes you out of the world you were completely lost in just moments before.

You are writing, well, you were writing.

It is Sunday morning, the children are asleep, and so this is when it must be done.

It is peaceful, the sunlight forcing its way through the cracks in the blinds, the dust jumping from sunbeam to sunbeam, the occasional car on the streets below, or the flush of a toilet somewhere in the building, the only sounds permeating the otherwise quiet room.

Still, it has to end, it always does. Someone has to wake-up. Lately it has been the little one, the one who sleeps in long T-shirts and tiny briefs, the Angry Birds displayed across his behind.

He is like a donut, his caramel skin so soft to the touch, and you want to consume him, always, and endlessly.

He drifts out into the living room like a small wave, and as he arrives one part of the day ends, and another begins.

Today is different though."

A most selfish yet loving James Claffey Literary Orphans Write to Survive Blood a Cold Blue Zine Interview shout-out thing.

Truth. Lots of Claffey. Blood a Cold Blue. Zine love. All of it. Enjoy.

Q: What serves as the motivation (or the spark) to embark on another tale?
A: God, isn’t that the million dollar question? Stories spring from so many places, a photograph, a song line, the memory of a moment in time, a news article, all sorts of things. Recently, I was looking at a NY Times gallery of photographs and there was one of a beautiful woman in the doorway of a rundown house and I wrote a piece that spun from that central image. It’s up at Ben Tanzer’s “This Zine will Change your Life,” and it’s called “The Sun Lost a Sibling.”