Ben Tanzer's Blog, page 72

Dispatches from Space - Gigantic Sequins, Philadelphia Sculpture Garden, Pen Parentis, Kyle MacLachan, the Michael Paige Glover, and home.

I just walked by Kyle MacLachlan, and though we didn't hug or anything, I think we can both agree that something happened.
— Ben Tanzer (@BenTanzer) April 8, 2014

 

Strong story by @saralippmann and a Nas nod from @BenTanzer are my @PenParentis highlights so far pic.twitter.com/OzXPZP7wId
— steve caputo (@caputosteve) April 9, 2014

. @bentanzer held us rapt w one of my favorite essays from his collection LOST IN SPACE cc: @penparentis http://t.co/aepVzt9oOT
— Brian Gresko (@briangresko) April 9, 2014

"The writing is funny and stylish." Lost in Space. That Lit Site. Yes.

Big thanks to That Lit Site and the Matthew Doughty for the kind words about Lost in Space, all humbling and greatly appreciated it is. Excerpt? Word.

"The 24 essays in the collection cover a broad range of topics, all told from Tanzer’s personal perspective. The topics range from talking about sex to movies that his children should watch, from escaping to Italy to the pain of dealing with a sick child. This range is a great strength of the collection, it keeps moving, shifting, changing, much as I imagine parenthood does. The reader never knows where or when we might be next, which children have been born, how old are they, and have their names been changed to protect the innocent? This gives the collection a tremendous sense of scale, but also keeps it intensely personal. There’s no need to read the whole collection at once, you can dip in, pick it up when you have a spare minute, perhaps when the kids are asleep or on the train."

And then there was the time that Lost in Space was all Barnes & Noble Union Square, yo.

Dispatches from Space - Conversations and Connections, Three Tents, Mellow Pages Library, This Podcast Will Change Your Life, and Adam Lawrence.

Huge thanks to @dhousley for organizing the fun panel today with the fab. @raebryant and @BenTanzer and @DFoy! Smooches all around!
— Jessica Anya Blau (@JessicaAnyaBlau) April 6, 2014

"Apparently when you write about family, you're supposed to use pseudonyms-- I did not do that." - @BenTanzer of @GIGANTICsequins 4.2.
— kimberly southwick (@kimannjosouth) April 6, 2014

@BenTanzer just cracked up the bartender with essay about his son's bris. Maybe best compliment a reader can get.
— dave housley (@dhousley) April 6, 2014

Had my first real-time interview for #WhenIFirstHeldYou yesterday. Thanks @BenTanzer for a great conversation!
— Brian Gresko (@briangresko) April 7, 2014

The New Edition of This Zine Will Change Your Life is live. All Yarrow. And full of Tomaloff.

The new edition of This Zine Will Change Your Life is live, and we are thrilled to have new poem, BILL YARROW IS ALSO A MOVIE CALLED BILL YARROW by David Tomaloff, and (almost) as always, photo action from Adam Lawrence, music curation from Jason Behrends and Koch brothers messaging prose love from Pete Anderson. We hope you enjoy this edition and we appreciate all shout-outs and links. Finally, please note, we are hoping more of you will submit comix, and music, novel excerpts, and art, and video, yes, video, and combinations there of. And most finally, go Gators, yo.

Wherein Lost in Space is all excerpt and I Believe in You (Sketches on the Younger Child) at the Hawai'i Pacific Review.

Quite excerpt. Endlessly younger. And very thankful to the Tyler Mcmahon and the whole Hawai'i Pacific Review crew for making it so. Excerpt? Word

"And so there is Noah, the younger one, so yummy from jump that I could just eat him, and I would, all of him, gulping him in massive bites, and not stopping to catch my breath for even a second. He’s like a donut, a grimy, oozy, sticky, crying powdered donut that I just want to touch and smell and curl-up with at every moment possible."

Shameless, albeit much appreciated, Jay Hill Lost in Space Tweet hype. And big thanks to the Jay Hill for that.

@BenTanzer this WV boy just got two @CurbsidePress titles in the mail today !! Can you say literary erection!!! pic.twitter.com/Ry33W3Fntq
— Jay (@jayhillmusic) April 4, 2014

We are awfully cool Orphans interview at the Clarkesworld Magazine.

Very cool in fact. We are also terribly appreciative. So do hit it. Excerpt? Word.

What were some of the surprises for you along the way while writing the novel?

I don’t map my books out in great detail anyway, but I always know where the story is going, and where it will end. Yet, there is a scene late in the book where the protagonist is thinking of confronting his clone, or Terrax, and reminisces about an accident his son had. In that scene which I hadn’t totally thought through beforehand, I had no plans to write about an accident, much less channel an accident my own son had, but there it was, it seemed perfect, and I ran with it.
The other kind of surprises though seem more self-serving to me, but there were ideas that I fixated on while writing that I didn’t necessarily have a reference point for, but have since become a more pronounced part of the news and culture. I had read an article in the Nation somewhere along the way about how the top one percent of the population possesses something like ninety percent of the nation’s wealth, which at the time was still a newer reality, and so I referred to these members of society in Orphans as “1-Percenters.” This was before the term “the 99 percent” had any traction however. Further, the idea to write about flash mobs protesting the Corporation emerged from a conversation I had with a writer friend of mine, but that conversation was long before Occupy Wall Street.

The characters in the book are also aware that someone, somewhere, is constantly listening to everything they say, and that is something that felt “near future” to me, but even then I cut some of that out so as to not seem too out there. Of course since then, all of the stories about the NSA have come out and now I realize I couldn’t have been excessive enough.

Wherein we are Three Tents Reading Series with the quite amazing Dan Brady, D. Foy, Justin Marks, and Kimberly Ann Southwick on April 5th in Washington, D.C. and look forward to seeing you there thank you cool done.

Like totally. More here. Seriously. Nice.

Rejoice! There is Largehearted Boy Lost in Space Book Notes essay.

Also, run, don't walk, please, and do hit it, it just might change your life. Cool? Awesome, thank you, all of you, though especially you Largehearted Boy, because you are most largehearted indeed. Excerpt? Word.


Side by Side/Dan Zanes

One final shout-out to the Dan Zanes, he of the crazed hair and quasi-punk, folk, hipster tunes, which allows so many parents, this one certainly, to feel even remotely alternadad or mom. I don't even know if the boys even liked Dan Zanes when they were really little, but if nothing else, we could always make them listen to him with minimal fussing, while not feeling terrible about ourselves. All of which is to say, that one day we went to see Dan Zanes at the Old Town Music School, and Jon Langford, yes that one, from the Mekons and Waco Brothers, was sitting next to us with his kid, and during the show Dan Zanes invited him on stage to perform, and when he did, I looked at Myles all wild-eyed, and like my dad before me, trying to make me care about paintings or cows on the side on the road, or whatever he wanted me to better appreciate, I said, "dude, fuck, wow, look, it's Jon Langford, the Jon Langford, of the Mekons." To which he replied, "Who cares?"

Who cares? I do. And apparently way too much at that.