This Podcast Will Change Your Life, Episode Seventeen - Stories. Redux. And Re-Release.

Tacos, Las Vegas and Barry Graham. Episode Seventeen.

This Podcast Will Change Your Life, Episode Seventeen - Stories.

Bam! The new episode of This Podcast Will Change Your Life is here, like right now. It is titled Stories and it stars none other than the quite cool Barry Graham, author of TBWCYL, Inc favorite The National Virginity Pledge and grand master of Dogzplot, Paper Hero Press and the most excellent Achilles Chapbook Series. We are quite geeked to have connected with him before he bundles up the family and heads off to his new gig at Rutgers and we think you will be as well. Please note, that if you choose to access the podcast via the above link it will take you directly to our page on imeem. If you choose to listen below, imeem now limits these embedded recordings to 30-second previews and asks you to follow their link if you want hear the full recording. That link also takes you to our page and so given this you may be wondering why we have embedded the recording here at all. Frankly, we don't know why, but please enjoy our new joint anyway, because we feel fairly confident it will change your life.

This post just might be about something that involves TBWCYL, Inc. spokesperson Ben Tanzer, his writing and the very cool Achilles Chapbooks series.

We are not going to say exactly what it is we might be alluding to, but we can say that we are very excited to be working on a new thing with Barry Graham and his crew at the very excellent Achilles Chapbooks series. Barry is thinking we might be running with this something this coming summer and we are thinking that we are quite geeked about all of this, because we are not only big fans of what Barry is doing with this series, which we would add has published many writers we dig including but not limited to the Jamie Iredell and J.A. Tyler, but we are also big fans of his writing, see our riff on The National Virginity Pledge, and zinesterness, please check-out the quite rocking Dogzplot if you have not done so already. This is all really good-stuff and we are excited to be part of it. Many thanks to Barry for the interest and we will keep you apprised of what's up with this project as it progresses.

Planes, trains, automobiles and You Must Be This Happy to Enter and The National Virginity Pledge. That and big thanks to Beaverdale Books.

We are happy to report that we have been to Des Moines and back and we want to thank Alice and Beaverdale Books for hosting us and Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine last night. It is a killer independent book store and we think you just might want to visit them and buy many books. We are also happy to report that we got to visit with the John Domini and his lovely wife and fellow author Lettie Prell, and in the next day or so you can expect a most excellent new Domini-centric edition of This Podcast Will Change Your Life. Finally, sort of, as we drifted between planes, trains, cabs, shuttles, and cars, we got to read, a lot, and we are now excited to give a shout-out to two books we really enjoyed:

First up, You Must Be This Happy to Enter by long-time This Blog Will Change Your Life muse Elizabeth Crane. What's interesting about this book for us, is that it was watching Ms. Crane read the story Donovan's Closet several years back at the Metro when we really got hooked on her and her writing, but as Cranium as this story is, and as funny and at times magically twisted as the stories in this book are overall, it is the two closing stories Most Everything in the World and Promise, that reminded us why we are such fans of hers. Elizabeth Crane knows relationship, and she endlessly, and wonderfully, captures the pain, confusion, and glee that comes with them like few others.

Similarly, the most excellent Barry Graham pulls off a really neat trick with The National Virginity Pledge. On the surface what you get is a series of awesomely disturbed pieces rife with prostitutes, gamblers, tacos, Wal-Mart, car crashes, and bodily fluids. The thing is, while the interplay between these images are entertaining all by themselves, what you come to realize as you slowly lose yourself in Graham's cracked world, is that these stories are also a super-insightful exploration of all the myriad ways relationships go bad, get lost, and leave us wanting.

Pink and Orange Graham? Yes, totally, its more writer on writer love. Plus some interview.

The highly entertaining and oddly coincidental stretch of recent TBWCYL, Inc. favorite writers talking to other favorite writers of ours continues with a killer interview on What to Wear During An Orange Alert between the possibly real Sam Pink, he of many excellent publications, including Move in With Me, the first ever piece published in This Zine Will Change Your Life and newish best friend ever Barry Graham publisher of Dogzplotz and author of The National Virginity Pledge. It is much fun, so much fun in fact, that the disctinct possibilty that reading it may also change your life seems almost secondary. Almost.