zo

If I could speak to writers, the thing I’d want to tell them is – write precisely specifically exactly the one thing you think is most important to you. If you can write well enough for your stuff to be published on the top zines around the net…I don’t need to know that. I mean, good for you, I applaud your success. But if you can’t tell me something really important, really meaningful here on Oct 2 ’08…why should I bother?

Like you, I’m busy writing a novel and all sorta other shit. Like you, I barely got time to read what my friends publish so’s I can keep up with what they’re doing. And yeah, I’d like to read some of the ‘talked about’ writers who got books published or coming out. Plus, I get review copies that I’m ‘sposed to read and maybe write about. So…time is a premium. Yeah, life’s short. And what I want (or need) outta any and all of this lit, is what’s really really really meaningful, special, stuff we all need to know.

And for me, David and Richard hit it right on the head. Damn…editors control what we see on the net, at the bookstore, in the library. They control what everybody reads. To a certain extent, that influences what everybody thinks, what everybody does.

Please, take that role seriously. Very very seriously. You send me emails and newsletters that this is your lineup for your new issue. So…please, if I’m to trust you that this is the best of all the submissions you’ve received, it really better be that. In fact, it needs to be that – if lit is going to impact the world. To make this a gooder place for all us kids to play in.

There just isn’t much time to reach me, or the other six billion. For that girl Pauletta, time’s up. Nobody got to her or the guy that murdered her. That hurts. Please, think of her, think of him, think…when you write, when you edit. It’s important, it matters.

Sometimes this may be the reality, people may heartily drink and ‘poetry’ is how they are expressing it but if you are going to write about that lifestyle you need to have at least lived it. My second chapbook ‘Stress’ written when I was in my late teens was all about binge drinking experiences, though as I’ve gotten older and more mature (sic) I have moved away from that both in terms of reality and the situations that I write about. It would be easier to still write about this lifestyle since their is a great demand for writing about the theme of alcoholism.

We still live in a culture where sex and shock value sells. Using singer Amy Winehouse as an example, the tabloids and the celebrity dirt tv networks like E! are thriving on her excess, yet not bemoaning the waste of a vocal talent. Expand this to the celebrity culture as a whole where we are bombarded with ‘stories’ and journalism about kiss and tell, coke in the bogs and redemption in reality tv, we are going through a cultural malaise. Even critically acclaimed dramas such as The Wire rely a lot on the shock factors of drugs and violence, so it’s not just something that affects the low brow. In your article you ask the important question, why? We can only assume people are writing for what they think people want and not what they truly want to say.