All I knew about Pennsylvania before the last couple of days was what I’d read in Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon. It’s the place with those big pretty barns, though; I know that now. Anyway, touched down about four in the afternoon, after getting up at 3:30 to catch the plane out of Lubbock (only got to sleep a couple of hours before that, too). My old/first writing prof was waiting for me there. Hadn’t seen him for years, I guess. Anyway, I said this in some interview a while back, but then it didn’t make it to the final version, but, reading his stuff for me’s just haunting, because I know how the words are all going to fall, because, I don’t know: because he taught me, I guess. got to me when I was even more impressionable than I am now.
Anyway, instead of going to my hotel, we went looking for a snowy owl, then found a television set so we could tune the weather station in, so he could show me where PA was on the map. Because I know nothing about geography, but, I mean, I had some serious doubts there could be one place that was so close to DC and NY and some other place that I can’t even remember anymore (all these places are made-up to me, pretty much anyway–I prefer Pynchon’s Nuevo York, myself [and the yo-yo]). But, to FF: a beautiful steak with new & cool people Morris and Maura, and Elizabeth, whom I hadn’t seen for years, and Bill, my old prof, then the reading, in one of the better auditoriums I’ve read in, then the bar and suddenly waking up, getting to ride in a real and actual Delorean to the airport. felt like Back to the Future.
Then, I don’t know: met various people I know in the airport(s), had enough buffalo wings for about four people, all that.
Anyway, no video this time–no pics that I know of, either–just forty-eight minutes of the reading (3-22-06), from the last bit of the intro (by William J. Cobb, of The Fire Eaters, The White Tattoo, and the upcoming Goodnight, Texas [looks like you can get some of his short stories through Amazon too]) through to the end of the Q&A. And, talking the Q&A, from what I heard cueing through this, the actual questions are maybe pretty quiet. Maybe it’ll make sense, though. looks like I read a couple of the flash fiction things I read at AWP, too. but the last story’s the one I read at the FC2 gig at AWP, which didn’t get recorded (and, the zombie story I think I talk about in here, it’s the one I mentioned in the post before this).
anyway, click here for the mp3.
is the NYT bestselling author of 35 or so books, +350 stories, some comic books, and all this stuff here. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, and has a few broken-down old trucks, one PhD, and way too many boots. More