Jan Steckel's Blog: Horizontal Poet Sings Bidyke Blues, page 7
June 30, 2009
2008-2009 News from the Horizontal Poet
My fiction chapbook arrived today! It looks beautiful. Mixing Tracks won the Gertrude Press Fiction Chapbook Award for LGBT writers. Here’s the publisher’s blurb for the 22-page book:
“A darkly comic and oddly touching story of sex, drugs, rock and roll, and a plane crash that crushes human bodies while leaving the mandolins unharmed. In Mixing Tracks, Jan Steckel strikes an unsettling balance between the consolations of memory, the thrilling ephemerality of youthful ambition, and our shared need for connection, even (or especially) when our world seems to have to come to its end.”
If you want to order one for $8, you may have to bounce around http://www.gertrudepress.org a bit, but please be persistent, and keep looking at the shopping cart icon. Sooner or later it will successfully register your order! Don't wait too long, though, because there are fewer than a hundred copies left. Start by going to the Catalog at the top of the site and pulling down the menu; click on Chapbooks.
Please help me by ordering Mixing Tracks from the Gertrude Press website at http://www.gertrudepress.org! If I can sell out this first print run, they may do another. If this fiction chapbook sells well like my poetry chapbook did, it may help me get a publisher for the full-length short story collection I finished recently. I’ll have some copies of Mixing Tracks to sell at my July readings, but I won’t be taking mail orders myself this time.
Upcoming readings:
Monday, July 6, 2009, at 7 PM. I’m featured with Joyce Jenkins (editor of Poetry Flash) and my husband Hew Wolff at the Gallery Cafe Reading Series hosted by Kit Kennedy. Open mic to follow. The Gallery Cafe, 1200 Mason St. at Washington, San Francisco, CA. 414-296-9932. Take the bus: #1 California, #30 Stockton, #45 Union. For more information contact Kit Kennedy, kitkennedy@yahoo.com, 415-305-1831.
Monday, July 20, 2009, at 6:40 PM. I’m featured with Seattle author Cat Ruiz plus open mic at Poetry Express, hosted by Mark States, Nance Wogan and Jim Barnard. Priya Indian Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. (near University Ave.), Berkeley, CA. 510-644-3977. Ask for special seating for poetry reading; 10% off dinner.
You can find details about my terrific co-featured poets at http://www.jansteckel.com/Events.html.
Publications
Fiction, poetry and essay publications over the past year and a half include work in Bellevue Literary Review, Sage Trail Poetry Magazine, The November 3rd Club, Outsider Writers, the anthology Getting Bi (2nd Edition), SoMa Literary Review, The Eloquent Atheist, Street Spirit, S.F. Heart, Faithful Fools Anthology: Living in the Land of the Dead, Vol. 3, Redwood Coast Review, and Bi Women. I have work forthcoming in Canary, Sparring with Beatnik Ghosts, and the anthology Best Bi Short Stories. My wonderful webmistress and Woman-Stirred colleague Nicki Hastie is gradually adding links to many of these to my website writing resume at http://www.jansteckel.com/Writing.html. Drop by to check out what’s new!
“A darkly comic and oddly touching story of sex, drugs, rock and roll, and a plane crash that crushes human bodies while leaving the mandolins unharmed. In Mixing Tracks, Jan Steckel strikes an unsettling balance between the consolations of memory, the thrilling ephemerality of youthful ambition, and our shared need for connection, even (or especially) when our world seems to have to come to its end.”
If you want to order one for $8, you may have to bounce around http://www.gertrudepress.org a bit, but please be persistent, and keep looking at the shopping cart icon. Sooner or later it will successfully register your order! Don't wait too long, though, because there are fewer than a hundred copies left. Start by going to the Catalog at the top of the site and pulling down the menu; click on Chapbooks.
Please help me by ordering Mixing Tracks from the Gertrude Press website at http://www.gertrudepress.org! If I can sell out this first print run, they may do another. If this fiction chapbook sells well like my poetry chapbook did, it may help me get a publisher for the full-length short story collection I finished recently. I’ll have some copies of Mixing Tracks to sell at my July readings, but I won’t be taking mail orders myself this time.
Upcoming readings:
Monday, July 6, 2009, at 7 PM. I’m featured with Joyce Jenkins (editor of Poetry Flash) and my husband Hew Wolff at the Gallery Cafe Reading Series hosted by Kit Kennedy. Open mic to follow. The Gallery Cafe, 1200 Mason St. at Washington, San Francisco, CA. 414-296-9932. Take the bus: #1 California, #30 Stockton, #45 Union. For more information contact Kit Kennedy, kitkennedy@yahoo.com, 415-305-1831.
Monday, July 20, 2009, at 6:40 PM. I’m featured with Seattle author Cat Ruiz plus open mic at Poetry Express, hosted by Mark States, Nance Wogan and Jim Barnard. Priya Indian Restaurant, 2072 San Pablo Ave. (near University Ave.), Berkeley, CA. 510-644-3977. Ask for special seating for poetry reading; 10% off dinner.
You can find details about my terrific co-featured poets at http://www.jansteckel.com/Events.html.
Publications
Fiction, poetry and essay publications over the past year and a half include work in Bellevue Literary Review, Sage Trail Poetry Magazine, The November 3rd Club, Outsider Writers, the anthology Getting Bi (2nd Edition), SoMa Literary Review, The Eloquent Atheist, Street Spirit, S.F. Heart, Faithful Fools Anthology: Living in the Land of the Dead, Vol. 3, Redwood Coast Review, and Bi Women. I have work forthcoming in Canary, Sparring with Beatnik Ghosts, and the anthology Best Bi Short Stories. My wonderful webmistress and Woman-Stirred colleague Nicki Hastie is gradually adding links to many of these to my website writing resume at http://www.jansteckel.com/Writing.html. Drop by to check out what’s new!
June 16, 2009
A 1980's Story that was Too Bizarre for the 1980's
After a quarter of a century, my 5,000-word story Mixing Tracks, written for an undergraduate fiction class at Harvard, is coming out as a chapbook! Mixing Tracks won the 2008 Gertrude Press Fiction Chapbook Award for LGBT writers and is now available on their website at http://elizabethsimson.com/gertrudepr....
Why did it take until 2007 for the story to get published, when guest edgy editor Peggy Munson (author of Origami Striptease) picked it up for Suspect Thoughts? Was it that it was written by a woman from the point of view of a man who is in love with another man? Was it that the adult male protagonist has the hots for a youth who may or may not be under-age? Was it that the seventeenth submission really is the charm?
Whether you want this 22-page book as one-handed reading, proof that persistence pays off, or so you can claim you have read it before you try to get it banned from your local library, don't wait. Fewer than a hundred copies are still available at http://elizabethsimson.com/gertrudepr... for the low, low price of $8.00. They'll make great stocking stuffers or party favors -- if you live in the Castro.
Why did it take until 2007 for the story to get published, when guest edgy editor Peggy Munson (author of Origami Striptease) picked it up for Suspect Thoughts? Was it that it was written by a woman from the point of view of a man who is in love with another man? Was it that the adult male protagonist has the hots for a youth who may or may not be under-age? Was it that the seventeenth submission really is the charm?
Whether you want this 22-page book as one-handed reading, proof that persistence pays off, or so you can claim you have read it before you try to get it banned from your local library, don't wait. Fewer than a hundred copies are still available at http://elizabethsimson.com/gertrudepr... for the low, low price of $8.00. They'll make great stocking stuffers or party favors -- if you live in the Castro.
Horizontal Poet Sings Bidyke Blues
Bidyke writer and disabled former pediatrician Jan Steckel writes about poetry, fiction, sexuality, doctoring, poverty, and what it feels like to remember what kind of socks everyone at her readings w
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