"High School" -- an authorial short

Please note

Please note all my regular blogging is now taking place at "Conversations in the Book Trade".

Conversations

My interviews with Philip Marchand of the Toronto Star, Jennifer Banash of Impetus Press, Richard Nash of Softskull, and Judy Stoffman of the Toronto Star (among others) are now up at "Conversations in the Book Trade".

Update: My interview with Ian Brown of CBC's "Talking Books" and the Globe and Mail is now up.

Update two: An edited version of my interview with Jennifer Barnes of Raw Dog Screaming Press is now up at the Brooklyn Rail.

Update three: New interviews at "Conversations" with Patrick Crean of Thomas Allen Publishers and Jordan Jones of Leaping Dog Press.

Site map

For an outline of my non-fiction manuscript Burying Another Living Soul, click here.

For examples of my screenplay-novel Truth Marathon, go here.

For my interview blog Conversations in the Book Trade, click here.

Truth Marathon - menu

To see the main page of my screenplay-novel Truth Marathon, click here.

To hear a podcast of Truth Marathon's plot and historical background, click here.

To see the book trailer, click here.

"Conversations in the Book Trade" -- Fred Ramey

"Conversations in the Book Trade" is an ongoing series at The Screenplay-novel Manifestos.

I am in the process of contacting people involved with books: either professionals or passionate readers. Hopefully this project will turn into something of a forum: both a resource for readers/writers interested in how the publishing side of things work, and an opportunity for editors, agents and authors to explain their side of the literary equation.

The focus of this project is literary fiction -- in particular, how it is to survive in an increasingly competitive "culture of narratives". I am interested in the reality of publishing now; not how it should be, or might have been if our culture had evolved differently, but how it is at this perilous moment in the early 21st Century, and how it might be in the near future.

Current interview:

Fred Ramey of Unbridled Books:
"What is shadowing the art of literature seems, rather, to be a combination of the corporate need for a sure thing and the instant availability of sales numbers. ..."
[To read the entire interview, click here.]

Previous:

Bev Daurio of The Mercury Press

"A Distant Mirror, Accelerating Quickly"

My op-ed on why literature is necessary for our full comprehension of history is up at the Korea Times:

Imagine a country is occupied by American forces after a war. Imagine these forces are greeted with tremendous euphoria when they first enter the capital. They are cheered and covered with garlands. An occupation government is established. It proceeds to reorganize the society. But it makes several serious mistakes, and within months the mood of the population has changed...

more

Another War That Didn't Count

source: Truman Library

"The Cry of the Magpies"

From "The Cry of the Magpies" by Kim Dong-ni:

Ok-nan said that her coughing fits had occurred even before the half year had elapsed. When months passed by without a word from me and the magpies continued to cry in the mornings, my mother's eyes began to glare in a strange way. Then the strange glaring of her eyes seemed to shift over to a long spell of coughs. At first her condition was not so very bad, but beginning about one year after I left home, she got to coughing almost wihtout fail whenever the magpies cried in the morning....

I remember my mother was in the habit of mouthing such words as "O, God!" or "Help me!" after her occasional coughing fits even before I left home for the battlefield. And now she was replacing those words with "Bong-su!" and "Kill me!"

In my view, there was not much inconsistency in this development. Rather, these seemingly contradictory expressions were no more mutually exclusive than the two sides of one coin. The way I looked at it, "Help me" could very naturally become "Kill me", a suffering deepened into bottomless despair.

[From ""The Cry of the Magpies", Kim Dong-ni, The Portable Library of Korean Literature, Jimoondang Publishing, Seoul, 1961, 2002.]