Among The Jumbled Heap

Interview with Bonnie Jo Campbell

Brief yet marvelous interview with Bonnie Jo Campbell at the Chicago Sun Times: http://blogs.suntimes.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/36628 My favorite part: I went right back to writing about Michigan! Still, I get letters from readers saying “you’re writing about my hometown in West Virginia,” or “you’re writing exactly about where I came from in Alabama.” I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal. I was one of those people! I wrote and said, "you're ...

2010: My Year In Reading

OR Strikes and Gutters Cobain and Taylor : Strike and Strike Early in the year, in the cold of January, I got a surprise with Heavier then Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain. I thought Heavier would be a mindless read, something to keep the brain processing words while I cast about for a better book. I read the book while poised next to Skull Creek, a bitter Ozark wind crippling my hands, and the book took me places in the mind I had not been in fifteen years. It was good to go back an...

Allie Gautogen

Last year on my birthday, some friends and I gathered in my den to celebrate the rite.  During the course of that evening this small band of merry men was transformed into the Baxter Lane Animistic Men's Chorus.  Thanks to my friend Jim Yates and his ever-present iphone, the origins of the BLAMC are forever captured in a series of photos and audio tracks.  The track featured here has one of the best throat-singing solo's that ever came out of a white man's throat, as well as the dronefully enlig...