Contributor KJ Hannah Greenberg (“Society’s Dirty Work”) has a new collection of poetry, A Bank Robber’s Bad Luck with His Ex-Girlfriend.

Contributor Kristine Ong Muslim (“All Rise” and “To Build a House”) has published a chapbook, Night Fish, with Shoe Music Press and has a book of poetry forthcoming from Medulla Press.

10. You blog more than you jog.

 
9. You have a favorite pen, which you use until it runs out of ink. If you lose said pen before it gets used, you’re genuinely upset. When it runs out of ink, you’re also genuinely upset.

8. You know that a workshop has nothing to do with Tech Ed or a home improvement project

7. The fact I didn’t use a period in number 8 is driving you nuts.

6. The fact I just used a cliché is also annoying you.

5. Though you really do support and love them, you also secretly hate every other writer on the planet, especially the ones more successful than you.

4. You spend tens of thousands of dollars on an MA or MFA program, knowing that it is unlikely you will ever make that money back with pure writing.

3. A byline in the New Yorker would be just as glorious of day as the day your first child was (or will be) born.

2. Walking through a dark alley is “interesting”; writer’s block is “scary”.

1. You read this entire blog to learn more things about yourself that you already know.

Next in our series “Best List,”  jmww Flash Editor Robert Vaughan lays out his top books of 2011, and what a full house it is!

1. Chronology of Water- Lidia Yuknavitch (Hawthorne Books)

This memoir re-defines the category eternally. A profoundly honest, brutal, and ecstatic celebration of life against all odds. I was so moved at times by this book that I had to set it down.

2. Men in the Making- Bruce Marchart (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

I could only read one of these stories per day, they were that achingly lush, and beautiful gems. Harsh, poignant, spare. From start to finish.

3.   Domestic Apparition- Meg Tuite (San Francisco Bay Press)

Just when you think you’re done reading every dysfunctional family story you possibly could, Tuite re-defines them in her own, sliced-to-the-sheer bone, effortless prose.

4.  Heavy Petting- Gregory Sherl (Yes Yes Books)

Hilariously irreverent and bawdy, clever, slick and fun. But don’t get too cozy, because the vulnerability slide into these flashes of life with electric slides.

5.   Ayiti- Roxane Gay (Artistically Declined Press)

Haiti shimmers through these stunning stories, as Gay blends fiction, non-fiction, and her signature prose poetry. Similar to memoir, without the self-indulgences.

6.  Volt- Alan Heathcock (Graywolf Press)

These stories are gut-wrenching, full of heartache, truth and disparities. Heathcock balances stark realism with lyrical lifting energy, carving beauty out of a savage world.

7.  American Masculine- Shann Ray (Graywolf Press)

The lines contain a muscular grace, and Ray is a master of a new twist on the myth and legends of the American West. This debut is an ode to the country we no longer inhabit.

8.  Train Dreams- Denis Johnson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

A particularly gripping novella, akin to an out of print B-side. Johnson continues to write about the down and out, originally published in 2003 in The Paris Review. It’s so original, I forgotten that I’d already read it once before.

9.  In This Light- Melanie Rae Thon (Graywolf Press)

Thon combines dazzling uncompromising characters with language that leaves me breathless. I felt as if I was experiencing these stories rather than reading them.

10.  Various Men Who Knew Us As Girls- Cris Mazza (Emergency Press)

A long time fan of Mazza, this novel takes on human trafficking, a vile subject still relevant today. This is a tough, yet thoughtful read.

Honorable Mentions:

 They Could No Longer Contain Themselves- (Rose Metal Press) A collection of five chaps from Elizabeth J. Colen, John Jodzio, Tim Jones- Yelvington, Sean Lovelace, and Mary Miller

Normally Special- xTx (Tiny Hardcore Press)

 Freight- Mel Bosworth (Folded Word)

Stories for Night-Time and Some for the Day- Ben Loory (Penguin)

How the Days of Love & Diphtheria- Robert Kloss (MLP, Nephew)

Disclaimer #1: I’m a poet.

Disclaimer #2: This list does not contain ten books like all the other top ten lists you read at the end of the year.

Disclaimer #3: I do not provide explanations why these books are here. You should just trust me and read them.

1. Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

2. Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

3. We the Animals by Justin Torres

4. Blueprints for Building Better Girls by Elissa Schappell

5. Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson

6. The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson

7. The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

jmww poetry editor Jenny Sadre-Orafai has some new work up at Jet Fuel Review. jmww contributor Timothy Gager has a new story up at Blue Lake Review,  which also features work by jmww editor in chief Jen Michalski.

jmww fiction editor Linda Simoni-Wastila has a one-sentence story up at HOOT.

Contributor Justin Sirois, whose excerpt from MLKING SCKLS was featured in the Summer 2009 issue of jmww, announced the release of his novel, FALCONS ON THE FLOOR, with Publishing Genius in March 2012.

(Wanna let us know how you’ve been? Email jmwweditor@gmail.com with your updates!)

We apologize for the inconvenience while we figure out what’s wrong. Hopefully we’ll be up and running soon!

To promote JMWW’s fall 2011 special nonfiction issue, we’re hosting an event at The Americana in Canton. We’re branching out into new areas of Baltimore other than just Hamden and Mount Vernon, and trying to get the word out about the awesome literary scene.

Two local essayists featured in the nonfiction issue, Ned Balbo and Jane Satterfield, will be reading. And, two other amazing local nonfiction writers, Evan Balkan and Paul Barbagallo, will be there, too. In addition to Baltimore’s best beers on tap and the great cuisine of The Americana, we’ll even have the comedian Rory Holderness doing a brand new routine catered for this event. That’s right. This ain’t no stuffy highbrow event. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll drink? Alllll gooooood.

We’d love to see you there! Please spread the word! And please check out the nonfiction issue (www.jmww.150m.com). We have an e-book, too!
About the readers:

Ned Balbo received the 2010 Donald Justice Prize, selected by A.E. Stallings, for The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems (Story Line Press/WCU Poetry Center). His previous books include Lives of the Sleepers (U. of Notre Dame Press, Ernest Sandeen Prize and ForeWord Book of the Year gold medal) and Galileo’s Banquet (WWPH, Towson University Prize). He is also the author of a chapbook, Something Must Happen (Finishing Line Press). He has received three Maryland Arts Council grants, the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Award, and the John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize. “My Father’s Music,” an essay on adoptive identity and ethnicity, appears in Creative Nonfiction’s anthology of Italian-American prose, Our Roots Are Deep with Passion (Other Press). He teaches at Loyola University Maryland.

Jane Satterfield is the author of Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond (Demeter, 2009) and two poetry collections: Assignation at Vanishing Point (Elixir Press Book Award, 2003) and Shepherdess with an Automatic (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, Towson University Prize). Among her awards are an N.E.A. Fellowship in poetry and three Maryland Arts Council grants, as well as residencies in poetry or nonfiction from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Satterfield has received the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society’s Gold Medal in the Essay, the Florida Review’s Editors’ Prize in nonfiction, and the Heekin Foundation’s Cuchulain Prize in Rhetoric for the Essay. Her craft essay, “Lucifer Matches,” appears in Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets (Southern Illinois U. Press). She is literary editor for the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement and teaches at Loyola University Maryland.

Evan Balkan has published five books of nonfiction, most recently The Wrath of God: Lope de Aguirre, Revolutionary of the Americas. His agent is currently hawking his novel, The Short Unhappy Life of Thomas Hammond. He is the Coordinator of the English Department at the Community College of Baltimore County and lives in Towson.

Paul Barbagallo, a candidate in the MA in Creative Writing Program at The Johns Hopkins University, is a veteran reporter of ten years. His work has appeared in The Washingtonian and other places.

Rory Holderness is an up-and-coming young live comedian and also Twitter comic. He has performed at clubs in and around Baltimore such as Fire House Tavern and Sonoma’s. His comedy articles have appeared on FunnyorDie.com and slacktory.com, and he is currently a contributor to nationallampoon.com. His various work can be found at cuddlyninja.com or @CuddlyNinja.

The main event:

Saturday, December 10 · 2:00pm - 4:00pm

The Americana

900 Kenwood Avenue

Jen Michalski: For the reader, it’s O-le-air. Something I did not learn until I met you in person (and that you have a Transformers folder). Anything else you want to spring on your dear, unsuspecting fans before we get started?

Greg Olear: Olear is an Americanized version of the Slovak name Olejár, which has both a “j” and a cool accent over the “a.” It means “oil man.” My grandfather shortened it, thus making us Irish. The folder belongs to my son, or rather was bought for him by my mother; he could care less about Transformers. As for something to spring on you, I have strep right now—that’s how I celebrated the release of my book: by going to the clinic for Zithro. Ah, the glamor of the writing life!

JME: The title Fathermucker. Talk amongst yourself.

GO: When I was in France for my Totally Killer book tour, I was often asked what the title meant. It is impossible to translate without employing the swear word for which it is a euphemism—a euphemism I’m trying to coin, as an all-inclusive way to refer to the modern, co-parenting dad. So I found myself using the word motherfucker more often than I normally would in Paris.

JM: Fathermucker is the day of a stay-at-home dad with two small children, Roland, 5, who’s also somewhere on the autism spectrum, and Maude, 3, his sister. As someone who doesn’t have children (although I am a stay-at-home pet owner), I was a little worried that some of the nuances (or even not-so-nuanced nuances) of the book would be lost on me. I was in for such a surprise! Although you write of parenthood as almost being akin to the world in Defcon 5, this parenthood you portray actually appeals to me. I thought, “I want kids who, left to their own toileting devices, leave a poopy handprint on the bathroom wall!” Is something wrong with me? It must be the love and care with which you’ve woven your characters, especially Maude and Roland.

GO: If you haven’t cleaned kid poop off a set of $500 white blinds at your in-laws’ house, you haven’t lived. But seriously, thank you. I was talking to David Gutowski, aka Largerhearted Boy, yesterday, and he noted that many novels use children as foils, rather than developing them as characters. I’ve noticed this, too, and it’s something I hoped to not do in my book; I wanted to make the kids as strong as the adults, in terms of characterization. So it pleases me to hear you say that. Also, you’re welcome to babysit anytime.

JM: I think the reader will also be surprised to learn so much about Asperger’s and austim-spectrum disorders, and, of course, your son was diagnosed with Asperger’s. Despite the wicked humor in Fathermucker, being the parent of a child with disabilities can often be a heart-breaking, back-breaking, never-ending challenge. In the beginning of the novel, I felt overwhelmed for the narrator, Josh, but, by the end, I felt hopeful, even envious of him. Despite the challenges and crushed juiceboxes and nose picking, there is so much love! How much of Fathermucker is really your experience?

GO: There is love! Thanks for saying so. There is a lot of overlap with my life, obviously, especially with the kids, who I hope will grow up and read this book as a love letter. I share many—but not all—of Josh’s opinions, and a lot of my experiences as a parent informed the writing. Most of the places I talk about in New Paltz are real. And there really are people who make yogurt out of breast milk. That said, it’s a work of fiction, and I’d like to stress that.

JM: Did you ever approach the book from the view of a memoir, and if so, why did you decide on fiction?

GO: It was never going to be anything other than fiction. I mean, I need that framework, that narrative structure, that plot—however slight the plot may be in this book compared with my first one—to seduce the reader. With that framework, I can get away with having a whole chapter written as a long Facebook feed. Otherwise, it’s just me talking about my day, and it’s not like my average day is so unusual that you’d want to read a whole book about it.

JM: In the book, Roland has some rather large, foam, interlocking states he’s rather fond of. In fact, he takes certain states to bed. Are there really big foam states you can put together, like a puzzle? Where can I get them?

GO: I just looked online but I can’t find the one we have, which my godmother bought at Marshall’s three Christmases ago (my son’s birthday, like Roland’s in the book, is December 25). One of the best gifts he’s ever gotten.

To find out more about Greg Olear and Fathermucker, go to http://www.fathermucker.com/.