Recently, I sat down with my friend Dana Gioia for a wide-ranging conversation about Ray Bradbury’s many contributions to culture and literature on the occasion of Bradbury’s Centennial. Dana is the former Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, and the former Poet Laurette of California. Our discussion ran in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Check it out here.
My new book of short stories is now available for pre-order directly from the publisher. To be totally candid, publishers and artists, sadly, don’t see much return, if anything, from books sold on Amazon. Buying direct from the publisher is the best way to support the future of quality book publishing. The team at Los Angeles-based Hat and Beard Press, along with illustrator Dan Grzeca, and myself, have poured our absolute hearts out into this project. There are 20 beautiful illustrations to go with each story. Click here to pre-order Dark Black.
The release date is June 30. And, as an added bonus—ALL copies pre-ordered through the Hat & Beard web site will be personally signed and dated by me and artist extraordinaire, Dan Grzeca. You’ll likely get an individual, one-of-a-kind doodle by me as well.
Finally, I thought I would share with you the front and back cover.
Much more news on Dark Black, and the book tour, coming very soon. Thank you for all of your support!
My debut short story collection, Dark Black, will be released April 21, 2020 by Los Angeles-based Hat & Beard Press. I’m honored that it will be the first book in H & B’s new literary fiction imprint.
As of now, the book has 20 stories in it, including a few you may be familiar with like, “The Girl in the Funeral Parlor,” “Conjuring Danny Squires,” “Live Forever!” and several others that have been published in lit journals and anthologies. But there are also many new stories that I am so excited to share with you all. This book is Gothic pop-cultural horror. That’s the best way I can sum it up.
Finally, it was essential to me to include illustrations in the book. My mentor, Ray Bradbury, bucked publishing trends throughout his career by including beautiful illustrations by his brilliant, longtime collaborator Joseph Mugnaini. Publishers often don’t see the need for this extra step, but Ray did. And I do too. The world is increasingly populated with visual learners. Art adds that next level of quality and evocation to a book. I am honored to be working with illustrator and printmaker, Dan Grzeca, well-known for his rock music prints for artists such as the Black Keys, Sharon van Etten, U2 and others. Here, I share the cover image for my next book, Dark Black.
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2020 marks the centennial of the great Ray Bradbury! Ray always told me he wanted to live to 100. And we can help him do this by keeping the man and his work very much alive in the hearts and minds of future generations!
The Man Behind the Masterpieces
Here I discuss the life of Ray Bradbury and my very close and dear relationship with him. You will learn about Ray Bradbury’s ascension from Midwestern obscurity to becoming a bonafide global icon. You will learn the origins of Fahrenheit 451, its importance in our present-day political landscape, and why I maintain that Bradbury did more to shape culture than any other 20th Century writer.
The Secret History of Fahrenheit 451
Learn the fascinating story behind the creation of one of the masterworks of dystopian literature and the man who created it.
In early October, I delivered the keynote address at the Kansas Association of the Teachers of English Conference. I have been outspoken about the relatively recent willful political attempt to strip-mine public schools and public libraries of funding in order to cultivate an uniformed constituency (see this Chicago Tribune article).
Here’s the damn deal: censorship is going on right this very minute, right before our very eyes. It’s not happening vis-à-vis high-profile, ALA banned book lists or Hitlerean book burnings. Nope. That’s all way too obvious. Censorship is occurring in a much more inky and clandestine fashion, it is a creeping shadow that deemphasizes books, the word and the teachers who celebrate these monuments to power, knowledge and speech.
So I went to Wichita in October. And I knew right off that I was with my people. And I told them this. YOU ARE MY PEOPLE.
I often speak at comic book conventions and literary festivals to an assorted mélange of cosplay geeks, word-nerds, book-worms, collectors, furries, four-color weirdos and assorted genre freaks. -I get these pop-cultural urchins. I am one of them. But at the KATE conference, I was truly with my people. English teachers are the trench warriors on the front lines of education, facing the Trumpian mustard gases of fetid disinformation. Teachers yearn for an informed society.
Super excited to deliver the keynote address tomorrow at the Roanoke Writers Conference in Roanoke, Texas. I am also conducting two seminars, one on the lessons of creativity I learned from the great Ray Bradbury, the other on overcoming self-doubt as a writer.
Cannot wait! If you are in the area, I hope you will come out and say hello!
I had a new short story published in Arcturus magazine a few months back and forgot to mention it here. This story will likely be in my forthcoming collection. At present there are 16 stories in this book, five of them are all-new, never before published. A couple are super-rare and ran in low-circulation print literary journals. Hopefully I'll have this all wrapped up by the end of this summer.