In this week’s episode, I catch up with Ben Blum, who was my colleague in a Jonathan Lethem workshop circa 2009, and talk about finding room for earnestness in a postmodern outlook, finding room for pleasure in a world sick with stimulation, and writing a challenging project that changes who you are as a writer.

TEXT DISCUSSED

NOTES

The music used in this episode was "Sweet Spot," "Chase," "Chaotica," and "As the Dark Wave Swells" by The Bambi Molesters.

All hail Mistie Watkins, content editor of The Drunken Odyssey.

Have you reviewed us on iTunes yet?

In this week’s episode, Tod Caviness, Julian Chambliss, Dianne Turgeon Richardson, and Jared Silvia join me in a roundtable discussion of the Star Wars Christmas Special of 1978 and maybe got a few other topics in there as well.

In this week’s episode, we return to September 5th, 2017, the 60th anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. This celebration included Tod Caviness, Janna Benge, Bob Kealing, Erik Deckers, Suleika Jaouad, Karen Price, Holly Kapherr, Jared Silvia, Chris Cortez and Mark Piszczek.

NOTES

Check out The Blue Bamboo Center for the Arts!

Learn more about The Kerouac Project residency program.

In this week’s episode, I talk with Vanessa Blakeslee about the new fiction anthology, A Very French Christmas, from New Vessel Press.

NOTES

Some context for the dubious Dutch tradition of Black Pete.

David Sedaris discusses this in his essay, "6 to 8 Black Men."

Be sure to check out the music of David Rego, whose song "Harp" appears on this episode.

This week I talk to Jacob Shores-Agüello, the resident of the Kerouac House in summer of 2017. We talk about the roles that genres play in the process of mourning, the improvistory games that can create a sense of shared culture, the glory of compression, and how to avoid the musical information car crashes that happen with prose.

TEXTS DISCUSSED

NOTES

Check out the offerings at the Annie Russel Theatre.

Check out Burrow Press's latest tome.

This week I talk to the fiction writer Laurie Stone, and we talk about the need for more craft in experimental work, what New York means for writers, the tricks of memory and aging, and our beloved avant garde forebears.

TEXTS DISCUSSED

This is a special episode, for Will Dowd, checks in to talk about how he turned his Drunken Odyssey blog, Areas of Fog, into a book! We try to get to the bottom of our editorial relationship, the trick of bypassing or appeasing the gatekeepers among the editors of the literary world, and how the weather affects every aspect of life in New England.

TEXTS DISCUSSED

NOTES

If you are at Miami Book Fair this weekend, stop by the Burrow Press booth!

In this week’s episode, I talk with Vanessa Blakeslee about Ann Hood's MorningStar: Growing Up With Books.

NOTES

Check out my interview with Ann Hood back on episode 242.

Episode 286 is a bonus episode, on the 1 year-anniversary of our national tragedy, the election day of 2016. I talk to the philosopher Bruce Janz about how to stay sane and process the current state of American democracy, and how our reading habits can console us.

[caption id="attachment_22372" align="alignnone" width="2016"] Photo by Lisa Roney.

On this week’s show, Sara Nicolas,Christina Farley, and Ella Martin, discuss the world of young adult fiction at Litlando, from February 25th, 2017.

This week is a live show: Horror Movie Poetry Night IV. We enter the dark rubicons of Saw, Annabel, Child's Play, SawII, The Lady in White, Phantasm, Return of the Living Dead, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, The Omen, Saw II, The Descent, The Bat, Dead Waves, Lair of the White Worm, and Terminator.

The TDO All Stars included Joshua Begley,

Elise McKenna,

Jeff Shuster,

Shawn McKee,

Jax Shelton,

and Amy Watkins.

NOTE

Special thanks to Wilson Santos and Vinyl Arts Bar!

On this week’s show, I talk about discovering character in the process of novel writing with Jay Baron Nicorvo!

TEXTS DISCUSSED

Episode 282 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I share a recording of Loose Lips, the monthly current events literary thing hosted by the inestimable Tod Caviness, with special guests Erik Deckers, Whitney Hamrick, Joe Snyder, Mary McGinn, and moi.

NOTES

Join us on October 21st at Vinyl Arts Bar in Orlando! 

Read Ta-Nehisi Coates's The First White President.

Episode 282 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I talk with Vanessa Blakeslee about Colum McCann's Letters to a Young Writer.

Books Discussed

NOTES

Colum McCann hosts a lovely Bloomsday reading every year at Ulysses Folk House in downtown Manhattan.

Check out my interview with the late Charlie Bethel, an amazing playwright and performer, back on episode 39.

Episode 280 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

On this week’s show, David James Poissant and I offer words of advice for 12 new writers and their questions. I probably swear more than I should in a classroom.

NOTES

Read Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The First White President."

Check out Orlando Shakespeare's production of Man of La Mancha.

Congrats to the finalists for Poet Laureate of Orlando: Curtis Meyer, Susan Lilley, and Terry Anne Thaxton.

Check out the music of The Bambi Molesters, an extraordinary surf rock outfit out of Croatia.

Episode 280 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

On this week’s show, I talk editing and publishing and writing and the post-MFA malaise with Leslie Salas.

TEXTS DISCUSSED

NOTES

Leslie Salas currently blogs for The Gloria Sirens, and is an editor at Sweet.

On this week’s show, I talk poetry with Brittany Perham!

NOTES

Check out my interview with Brittany Perham's chapbook collaborator, Kim Addonizio.

RIP, Jerry Pournelle and J. P. Donleavy.

On this week’s show, I have a fun conversation with the journalist, surfer, and Buddhist Jaimal Yogis about the provisionality of our knowledge, philosophy, zen, surfing, writing, avoiding preciousness, and the lunacy of the ego.

NOTES

Please consider donating to The Drunken Odyssey’s indiegogo fundraiser here.

Episode 276 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

On this week’s show, I speak with the poet Tina Giannoukos about the glorious visibility and flexibility of sonnets, plus Sabrina Napolitano writes about how reading Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay changed her life.

Notes

Consider donating to The Drunken Odyssey’s indiegogo fundraiser here.

Go here for details on the 60th anniversary party for On the Road at the Kerouac House.

In this week’s episode, I talk with Vanessa Blakeslee about Rainer Maria Rilke's famous Letters to a Young Poet, plus we pay homage to Rilke's poetry with readings by Craig Moreau, Hyejung Kook, David Foley, Jason Morris, David Mcloughlin, and Amy Hosig.

Kristen Arnett & Lisa Roney at Litlando 2017, at The Gallery at Avalon Island.

NOTES

Consider donating to The Drunken Odyssey's indiegogo fundraiser here.

Learn more about the nonprofit Page 15 here.

Follow Kristen Arnett on twitter here, or check out her website.

Check out The Florida Review here.

Go here for details on the 60th anniversary party for On the Road at the Kerouac House.

Go here for details about Functionally Literate's next event with SJ Sindu and Kristen Arnett on September 23rd at the Blue Bamboo Center for the Arts.

On this week’s show, I catch up with Jason Croft about the continuing evolution of pin up and burly-q culture, Bunny Yeager's legacy, the awesomeness of Medusirena, writing for pulp magazines, the joys and struggles of editorship, and the 10th anniversary of Bachelor Pad Magazine, where some of my work has been published.

TEXTS DISCUSSED

NOTES

If you can contribute to my indiegogo fundraiser, please go here.

On Sunday, August 13th at 3 PM, join me and the other authors of Other Orlandos to celebrate its book launch!

Episode 273 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

On this week’s show, I talk to the poet and memoirist Henry Hughes about how to get over rejection, poetry, the freedom of ekphrastic work, memoirs, and fishing,

Plus Todd Boss reads his poem, "One of the Joys of Dry Fly Fishing."

In this week’s episode, I curate more blues music that has sustained me in this summer of working too hard.

In this week’s episode, I talk with Curtis X. Meyer and Caleb Zachary Matthews about the Slam Nationals that Team Orlando will be attending, the upsides and downsides of Slam Poetry, plus they perform their work!

Caleb Zachary Matthews, Raquel Henry, John King, and Curtis Meyer.

NOTES

• Help send Sherdes Leona, Caleb Zachary Matthews, Faith Elizabeth, Curtis X. Meyer, & Kira Calvaresi to the Slam Nationals here.
• On July 28th, I am hosting a reading by Jaimal Yogis at the Kerouac House.

In this week’s episode, I talk with Vanessa Blakeslee about Robert Paul Lamb’s Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story. Five years in, TDO finally devotes a show to Hemingway, and Bob's discussion of Hemingway's craft is profoundly illuminating to how effectively extraordinary Hemingway's aesthetics were. I somehow manage not to tell the story how in my Purdue years, my roommates and I dubbed the more rustic of our two bathrooms as The Ernest Hemingway Memorial toilet, with a lot of great photos of Hem in it.

On this week’s show, I talk to the poet and novelist Kathleen Rooney about the flaneur as geographic narrator of imaginative space, the aesthetic pleasures of walking, writing about New York City, the value of elderly characters, the dramatic provocations of history, and the structure of the novel of memory.

TEXTS DISCUSSED

NOTES

• On June 16th, I am hosting a fundraiser for the S.A.F.E. Words poetry slam at Writer’s Atelier.
• On July 28th, I am hosting a reading by Jaimal Yogis at the Kerouac House.

On this week’s show, I talk to my friend Nathan Holic, who is an Orlando writer and editor of the 15 Views of Orlando anthology series. While in situ at The Contemporary Resort, we discuss the stressors of theme park-going, the uses of such postmodern settings, and the odd counterbalances of melodrama and dark satire in Stanley Elkin's The Magic Kingdom.

TEXTS DISCUSSED

NOTES

Mary Cottle's room? The equivalent of room 822 now, but perhaps not back in 1986. (No, we didn't knock on the door.)

Check out Nathan's books!

• On June 16th, I am hosting a fundraiser for the S.A.F.E. Words poetry slam at Writer’s Atelier.
• On July 28th, I am hosting a reading by Jaimal Yogis at the Kerouac House.

On this week’s show, I talk to fiction writer, Shasta Grant, the Kerouac House resident from the spring of 2017.

NOTES

Shasta's chapbook is now available from Split Lip Press.

On June 16th, I am hosting a fundraiser for the S.A.F.E. Words poetry slam at Writer's Atelier.

On July 28th, I am hosting a reading by Jaimal Yogis at the Kerouac House.

On this week’s show, I talk to Todd Boss, whose new book, Tough Luck, includes a poem sequence inspired by the disaster of the I-35W Bridge's collapse in Minneapolis,



plus Malcolm Kelly reads his poem, "Visual Vignettes of Some Gay Shit."

TEXT DISCUSSED

NOTES

• Check out The Drunken Odyssey's classic Bloomsday show, episode 104.
• Read Nicole Oquendo's poem, "Binding We," over at The Florida Review.

In this week’s episode, I talk with Vanessa Blakeslee about Jhumpa Lahiri’s experiment in becoming an Italian writer, In Other Words.

On this week's show, I talk to Missy Barnes, Lena Barker, and Nicholas D'Allesandro about their production of Urinetown.

NOTES

Follow the Annie Russel theatre here.

Check out Episode 119 for Sam Slaughter's essay about Denis Johnson.

David James Poissant reads his keynote at Litlando, from February 25th, 2017!



TEXTS DISCUSSED

Episode 261, I interview the prose writer Sarah Gerard about her essay collection, Sunshine State, and her novel, Binary Star.

260 shows equals a fifth anniversary, I've decided, so it was a pleasure to talk to someone who was here at the very beginning. Jaroslav Kalfař was my occasional co-host to talk about craft books, during those last days of his being an undergraduate at the University of Central Florida. Five years, one MFA, and one novel later, Jaroslav is an international literary phenomenon. We try to catch up and manage to talk about writing along the way, plus Heleen Sikorski reads her poem "Autoerotic Alliteration."

On Episode #258, I am joined by Julian Chambliss, Dianne Turgeon Richardson, Tod Caviness, and Kevin Hutchinson to talk about Star Wars in honor of May the 4th. We talk about the questionable genius of George Lucas, the role of Disney in anticipating the needs and desires of the SW audience, the imposition of romance in war narratives, and the profound role of play in our development of self. A lot of beer was drunk. We made fun of each other.

In this week’s episode, I talk with Vanessa Blakeslee about Margaret Atwood's In Other Worlds and The Handmaid's Tale.

In this week’s episode, I shut up and let Ephraim Scott Sommers, Vanessa Blakeslee, and David James Poissant discuss how to get published in lit mags, plus Tiffany Fussell discusses how The Secret Garden changed her life.

In this week’s episode, I talk to fiction writer Holly Tavel about the urge to experiment in fiction, the need to subvert grand narratives, and the joys of the avant-garde and children's schlock and obsessions of all kinds,

Plus I chat with Michael Martin about the fascinating ways poetry finds itself entering Miami during the month of April.

TEXTS DISCUSSED

NOTES

Learn more about the O Miami Poetry Festival, including its schedule of events, here.

On this week’s show, David James Puissant and I offer words of advice for new writers and answer some of their questions, in the equivalent of our 8th mailbag episode, almost 2 years after the 7th...

plus Ramona Pojoga writes about a book that changed her life!

In this week’s episode, I talk to animator Barry Temple about his extraordinary professional experience in show business. We cover career highlights like The Mouse and His Child, Ralph Bakshi's animated version of The Lord of the Rings, and the arc of Disney animation in the 1980s (from Don Bluth's defection to the renaissance of Disney filmmaking). We discuss the role that perseverance and adaptation play in a successful career, and what it is like to create animation before a theme park audience.

TEXTS DISCUSSED

NOTES

On April 15th, check out this amazing fundraiser for Exodus United at The Geek Easy.

Save

In this week’s episode, I talk to Gary Evans, Brian Crum, and Adam Watson of The Intoxicators about writing music, working collaboratively, fast tempos, and staying fired up!

ALBUMS

In this week’s episode, I talk with the poet Ephraim Scott Sommers.

TEXTS DISCUSSED

NOTES

Litlando 2017 will take place on March 25th at The Gallery at Avalon Island. Buy tickets now here.

Check out Ephraim's music here.

Come to Ephraim's book launch, if you are in Orlando.

Episode 219 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I share a recording of Loose Lips, the monthly current events literary thing hosted by the inestimable Tod Caviness, with special guests Josh Dull, Racquel Henry, Darlyn Finch Kuhn, and me.

In this week’s episode, I talk with the poet Ashley Inguanta, plus Daniela Chamorro writes about how Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street changed her life.

In this week’s episode, I talk with Vanessa Blakeslee about E. L. Doctorow's Creationists.

NOTES

I'll be appearing at 

• Lil Indies, in Loose Lips on March 7,
• the Henao Contemporary Center, in the Second Saturday reading series ($5 cover), on March 11^th,
• a new Modular Collective Art show on March 23rd,
• and at the Gallery at Avalon Island in Litlando on March 25^th.

This week’s episode is an eclectic mix of poetry, fiction, and an interview on the subject of the American presidency. This show features Jennifer Berne, Shawn McKee, Karen Best, Christopher Booth, Jeremy DaCruz, & Lauren Camp.

NOTES

On Monday, February 27 at 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM, at Bookmark It in The Lovely, Vanessa Blakeslee will lead a discussion of Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here.

Save

This week features our 5th annual Erotic Poetry Night, featuring...

• Naomi Butterfield
• Ephraim Scott Sommers
• Diane Turgeon Richardson
• Wilson Santos
• Stephanie Rizzo
• Brian Downes
• Rachel Kolman
• Lisa Roney
• Madison Strake Bernath
• & your host, John King.

In this week’s episode, I talk to the novelist and memoirist Tom McAllister about structuring long-form fiction, the mystery of love, the addictive horrors of football, and other important matters.

NOTES

Follow Bookmark It on Facebook to learn more about Brave New Book Club, which is led  by Vanessa Blakeslee.

Save

In this week’s episode, I talk to the novelist and memoirist Lily Brooks-Dalton.

TEXTS DISCUSSED

NOTES

According to Buzzfeed, Roxanne Gay has pulled her forthcoming book, How to Be Heard, from Simon and Shuster.

In this week’s episode, I talk to the poet Joy Harjo, the poet and fiction and creative nonfiction writer Kim Addonizio, and the memoirist Paul Lisicky.
 

NOTES

On Sunday, February 5th, The Drunken Odyssey will be hosting its annual erotic poetry night at Vinyl Arts Bar in Orlando, Florida. 7 PM.

In this week’s episode, I talk to fiction writer Ann Hood,

and the graphic novelist Art Spiegelman.

TEXTS DISCUSSED

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NOTES

Monica Crowley, Donald Trump's choice for senior director of communications for the National Security Council, is a plagiarist. 

On Sunday, February 5th, The Drunken Odyssey will be hosting its annual erotic poetry night at Vinyl Arts Bar in Orlando, Florida. 7 PM..

In this week’s episode, I talk with Vanessa Blakeslee about Jennie Jarvis's Crafting the Character Arc: A Practical Guide to Character Creation and Development.

Plus Scott Hoffman reads his essay, "I read Ethan Frome every January."

TEXTS DISCUSSED

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