Tell Me a Story - Michael Kimball. Yes, that Michael Kimball.

Word. Big word. TBWCYL, Inc. favorite Michael Kimball has penned a fine piece titled "I Wanted to Go With Her" for TNBBC's The Next Best Book Blog's Tell Me a Story feature and we are quite digging it. Quite. All of it. So please do take a look, because it just might change your life. Word.

"It was my sophomore year of high school before I received a telephone call from a girl. Her name was Ellen Bonner and she sat across from me in our beginning typing class. I used to tease her about anything that I could think of—the way she styled her hair, the shape of her nose, the width of the stripes on her corduroys, the flowers on her blouse, the way that she spelled her last name, which was almost funny. Of course, I only did this to Ellen Bonner because I really liked her."

Who deserves more recognition? Apparently we do. Big thanks to TNBBC's The Next Best Book Club.

So nice to stumble into the Ten Authors Who Deserve More Recognition list at the always wonderful and supportive TNBBC's The Next Best Book Blog and see TBWCYL, Inc. spokesperson Ben Tanzer coming in at number three and keeping company with among others the Joshua Mohr and Michael Kimball both TBWCYL, Inc. favorites and authors we are big fans of. We were also taken with the fact that we didn't recognize everyone on the list, hence the recognition thing, which us got thinking, that we can, should, need to read more, learn more and support more writers everywhere, and maybe, maybe we can encourage you to as well, because it just might change your life, and it will very likely change theirs.

"This guy right here is one of the most active, interactive authors out there right now. He runs a blog, online 'zine, podcast page, guest posts, tweets, raises his kids, and runs...! Phew! How does he manage to write as much as he does with a schedule like that? In novels like You Can Make Him Like You and Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine, Tanzer rips open the heads and hearts of his male characters so you can see what's really going on in there. His novels also have this comfortable retro-90's feel to them, which I adore."

The Best Damn Creative Writing Michael Kimball Artistically Declined Mud Luscious Blog...Period.

We of course quite dig the Dear Everybody by Michael Kimball and are quite excited then to have run into his fine interview with the quite fine The Best Damn Creative Writing Blog...Period, where Michael not only gets quite Kimball, and please do enjoy the excerpt below, but celebrates our good friends at the Artistically Declined and Mud Luscious Press.

And last but not least, do you own an e-reader? If so, which one? If not, why?

I don’t own an e-reader. As close as I get to one is reading a lot of fiction online. But I’m old school. I like paper and ink. I like to fold the corners of pages down.

This Book Will Change Your Life - Sweet Charlotte's Seventh Mistake by Cori Crooks.

We recently had the chance to read Sweet Charlotte's Seventh Mistake by Cori Crooks and to say it makes for an intriguing companion piece to Dear Everybody by Michael Kimball or even The Lost Episodes of Beatie Scareli by Ginetta Correli would be most accurate we think. It is memoir as scrapbook, and its pages are filled with shreds of memory, swirling fragments of truths and untruths and the detritus, both physical and emotional, we accumulate across a lifetime. It is beautiful and dissonant. And it just might change your life.

This Book Will Change Your Life - Stories II by Scott McClanahan.

First off, we just want to say that we are looking to go a little Lovelace today with what looks to be a multi-sectional and multi-photoed riff on Stories II by Scott McClanahan. This has happened once before when were in the immediate throes of the quite excellent Dear Everybody by Michael Kimball and it felt good, real good, and if it didn't actually change anyone's life, well it certainly changed ours.

And so here we are again. But here's the thing, writing about Scott's writing suddenly seems like a trickier thing to do then when we wrote about Scott's last collection Stories. We say this, because lately the stuff we've seen on Scott sometimes feels like it is wrapped-up in Scott himself and what he represents to whoever may be writing about him. We think he is as awesome as everyone else does, but our concern, is that what might get lost is discussing the quality of the work, and even the quality of his reading of that work, because of this potentially Dylan-like love of Scott and his Scottness. Now please note, we get it, we do, really, because we're there too, and we have probably abetted it, but we still want to fight it.

Which brings us back to the fantastic Stories II, which is fantastic for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is in comparing it to Stories. As we read Stories II, we were reminded of when we read the quite rocking When I Moved to Nevada by Jamie Iredell. We were clearly in Iredell territory, bars and chicks and the like, but as compared to the also impressive Atlanta, Jamie had found a way to expand this universe, making it less claustrophobic by embracing nature and the natural world. It was quite a feat and it should be celebrated as such.

Which brings us back to Stories II, a collection that exists firmly in McClanahan territory, a world where some guy named Scott seeks to not just make sense of the world around him, but embrace it for all it has to offer. Its a world filled with death and illness, dog's goiters, iconic kidney stones and adulterers being beaten to a pulp even as the narrator eats said adulterer's pizza and watches the aforementioned beating. And yet, here's the thing, Stories II is more than that as well, because in this collection Scott bends his stories further in terms of religion and ghosts, adding a layer of mysticism and spirituality that both enriches the stories and takes them from the near fables of Stories to actual fables, fables about a guy named Scott just trying to make sense of the weirdness, humor and sadness that permeates the world around us.

The TBWCYL, Inc. 2009 Top Ten Lists are coming and today you get our Top Ten Books. No for real, you do. Just look below.

As there was much work travel and work furlough in 2009, there was much reading, hence we terribly excited to roll-out TBWCYL, Inc.'s 2009 Top Ten Books List, the first of our 2009 Top Ten lists, all of which we intend to post over the next couple of weeks. As with previous years, most of these books are from indie presses, which makes us happy, and many are written by friends, which makes us biased, though luckily, we love being biased almost as much as we love being self-absorbed. In terms of housekeeping, please note, that unlike our other end of the year lists, we do not limit ourselves to books published in 2009. Further, pretty much all of the following books were written about or blurbed here at This Blog Will Change Your Life, so, while we will keep the verbiage to a minimum today, we will be hyper-linking like there's no tomorrow. And who knows, maybe there won't be.

(1) Radiant Days/Michael A. Fitzgerald
(2) Stories/Scott McClanahan
(3) Big World/Mary Miller
(4) Dear Everybody/Michael Kimball
(5) Put Your Head in My Lap/Claudia Smith
(6) The Collectors/Matt Bell
(7) The Understory/Pamela Erens
(8) The National Virginity Pledge/Barry Graham
(9) When the Cats Razzed the Chickens & Other Stories/Mel Bosworth
(10) Conquering Venus/Collin Kelley

Some additional 2009 literary love (albeit in no particular order): Safelight/Shannon Burke, Full of It/Tim Hall, When I Moved to Nevada/Jamie Iredell, Bad Monkey/Curtis Smith, The Slide/Kyle Beachy, Sunlight at Midnight, Darkness at Noon/Hosho McCreesh and Christopher Cunningham, Some Things That Meant the World to Me/Joshua Mohr, Tranny/Steve Lafler, Fast Forward/Eric Spitznagel, You Must Be This Happy to Enter/Elizabeth Crane, Questionstruck/William Walsh, Talking Heads: 77/John Domini, Too Young to Fall Asleep/Sally Wiegel, Oh Baby/Kim Chinquee, One of These Things is Not Like the Others/Stephanie Johnson, The Complete Collection of People, Places & Things/John Dermot Woods, All the World's a Grave/John Reed.

And finally, for your retro viewing pleasure:

TBWCYL, Inc.'s 2008 Top Ten Books List

TBWCYL, Inc.'s 2007 Top Ten Books List

More interview. More Michael Kimball. More Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine love. And Lenny Bruce. Sweet.

We are most excited, and a little embarrassed, to share a new interview with you done by none other than the most excellent writer Michael Kimball, author of TBWCYL, Inc. favorite Dear Everybody. The interview appears at The Faster Times and we hope you will take a look. Many thanks to Michael and drinks on us for sure when next we meet. We have also posted a brief excerpt below for your reading pleasure, so please do feel free to pleasure yourselves while you read it.

Kimball: Okay, now I have to ask: What do your characters want?

Tanzer: They want to feel less confused. They want to better understand how they have arrived where they are and how they seem to find themselves in the situations they do. They know on some level that they are complicit in these things, and that they are repeating certain self-destructive behaviors or relationships, but they can’t quite figure out how or what they might have done differently. They also want to know things like how violence can just occur out of nowhere, unprompted, and why a parent might leave a family with no explanation, but they can never quite make sense of this either. Nor can they fully see how the events in one’s life connect, that there are ripple effects, and that if they were a little more curious and reacted a little less reflexively to things the world might make more sense. In all of my work, there is always the hope or the moment when some level of realization is achieved, or could be, but the characters never quite escape the confusion. There will always be new challenges and new relationships, and some things just don’t work or get any better. This is what life is and if you don’t believe me just read Michael Kimball’s excellent life on a postcard series. Now, how’s that for plug?

PRATE interview love. Parker Stevenson. And the Peter Schwartz. Goodness.

As previously mentioned we love you a lot. Well that, and there has been an odd, but much appreciated surge in interest in Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine and TBWCYL, Inc. spokesperson Ben Tanzer. Last week we were happy to share with you the very awesome Mel Bosworth Most Likely video and today we are quite excited to let you know that Ben has been interviewed by the quite cool Peter Schwartz as part of the really stellar Full of Crow PRATE interview series. Previous interviews include rock star writers Michael Kimball and Tim Hall and we are thrilled to be part if that line-up. We also hope you will take a look and as a wee teaser we offer you the following excerpt below:

P.S.: You had me at elaborate lie. Please, tell a lie, a secret, and a little known fact and then we’ll just invite our kind readers to jot down which they think is which. At the end of this interview, we’ll reveal the real answers and those of you with all three correct answers will WIN A FREE PRIZE that will both literally and figuratively blow your mind.

B.T.: Great question, and very Zellweger of you. Here you go:

(1) I once wrote Parker Stevenson a fan letter and asked him his advice on how one goes about becoming an actor. I sent it to Teen Beat where he had a column during the 70’s. He never responded and years later when Kirstie Alley left him I felt vindicated.
(2) I auditioned for the role of the son in The Shining. They told me I didn’t seem creepy enough, something a number of women I dated in high school would later strongly disagree with.
(3) When I was kid my parents would leave my brother and I at movie theaters to watch movies two even three times in a row. Between showings I would eat the popcorn that people left behind and to this day I have an intense craving for stale popcorn every time I watch Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

Meta? Entertainment? Self-absorption? All of the above?

We were quite excited to find that Michael Kimball blurbed on the Alma Books blog about the blurb we posted here on This Blog Will Change Your Life about his terrific novel Dear Everybody. We're not sure if this qualifies, or maybe more accurately, extends our ongoing self-fascination with all things TBWCYL, Inc., but we also couldn't exactly recall another time we have encountered this. So, what are we saying? Oh yes, we're excited. Well that, and if you give a blogger a cookie, well you know.

Dear Everybody by Michael Kimball.

Right off the bat, we should say that we are feeling all quasi-Lovelace with this multi-photo, and multi-leveled, is that the right word, blog post/book blurbage. Still within moments of delving into Dear Everybody by Michael Kimball, the dark overlord of all things writing, film and interview - see the most excellent Michael Kimball Writes Your Lifestory (on a postcard) series, and please note that TBWCYL, Inc. spokesperson Ben Tanzer has been so postcarded, loved it and thinks you should try it as well - we couldn't help but think of the scene in Rocky III when they ask "Clubber" Lang as played by Mr. T. his prediction for his upcoming fight with The Italian Stallion and he replies "pain."

Because here's the thing you know there is pain to come. What you also quickly know is that the experiencing said pain is going to be highly engrossing. And what you ultimately find out - spoiler alert, maybe - is that a book about child abuse, mental illness and suicide can be done without magic realism or horrific near-horror movie violence, but still be moving, even paralyzing, and that pain can be captured on the page both sparsely and lyrically, an achievement that is magical in all its own way.

A final note, we realized that yesterday's post had nothing to do with bearded writers/artists of any kind and so we want to thank both Michael and Mr. T. for getting us back on track.

This Self-Portrait Will Change Your Life, Week Thirty-Seven - "Dear Everybody."

It is week Thirty-Seven of This Self-Portrait Will Change Your Life, our effort to post one self-portrait per week for one year. We have just started reading Dear Everybody by Michael Kimball, hence the title of this week's edition, and while we promise to report back to you when we finish the novel, our prediction at this point? Pain. Lots of pain. Well that and terrific writing. Meanwhile, if you would like to track this project in its entirety you may do so at the Flickr. And if you would like to see a self-portrait of your very own posted right here on the blog please do hit us with one like right now. Thanks.

Wunderbar. First, a William Walsh - Michael Kimball intersection, and now a Mark Baumer - J.A. Tyler mash-up. It's almost too much to process.

Right? Just last week we reported on TBWCYL, Inc. favorites Michael Kimball and William Walsh joyously intersecting at the Word Riot and this week we are stunned to find a terrifically wacked-out, yet not so atypical, Mark Baumer/Everyday Yeah interview with none other than the J.A. Tyler. How's this possible? Its mayhem, wonderful intersecting stellar writer on writer mayhem, and we just can't take anymore. Okay, we can. So, who's up next week? Huh? Who?

A quite fun William Walsh - Michael Kimball intersection of sorts. Assuming intersection is the right word. Either way, it is definitely an interview

We were quite thrilled to see talented writer dudes Michael Kimball and William Walsh, two of our newest and arguably best friends in the whole world, cross paths at Word Riot, where Michael has interviewed William about his new book Questionstruck, while requesting that all of William's responses be phrased as questions. Much fun. Nice work gentlemen.