Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Launching The Strange Recital

Seven months ago I embarked on a creative venture that is unusual for me because it’s a collaboration -- a thing for which I’d come to believe I have no talent. Fortunately, my collaborator and I seem to think alike in a few ways that are important for this particular project, so now the landing gear is up and we’re off the ground, gaining altitude slowly but steadily.

It may actually have started over a year ago, with one of those dog-walking meetups. My wife met a fellow pooch owner on Woodstock’s Comeau trail, a guy who wanted to find local writers-for-hire to create an episodic genre fiction podcast, a commercial venture. She referred him to me, I gathered a few likely folks, we had meetings, then the whole thing took a left turn and disappeared. But meanwhile, I mentioned it to my new acquaintance, local author-musician-audio engineer Tom Newton, during our very first get-together over coffee at Bread Alone. It was a connection born on Facebook; I had read and reviewed Tom’s surreal e-novella (Warfilm, Bloomsbury Publishing) before I ever met him in person.

So would Tom later have suggested collaborating on a podcast anyway, or not? No way to know. But suggest it he did, and when I said yes let’s do it, he came up with several stories, the title, the audio tag, the music, the graphics, and the website itself (which is why I think of him as the Mad Renaissance Genius of Byrdcliffe). I contributed a subtitle: "a podcast about fiction that questions the nature of reality."

Since then we’ve each reached out to our pools of writer friends and now have a pipeline of stories in various stages of production, lined up to be released twice a month into the indefinite future. I’ve learned the ins and outs of podcast distribution, a whole new way of getting good writing and ideas out into the world, a great addition to the book production skills I’ve gained over the years as a small indie publisher.

Explore our website here: The Strange Recital -- and join our email list. Or listen at one of our various other venues:  iTunes, Stitcher, Soundcloud, Google Play Music, Facebook.  It's all free.
Always a highlight of my week, Tom and I get together in The Palace of Materialized Dreams (his studio) as often as we can, usually with a writer/reader friend. We do a little recording and editing, and then he performs more audio magic into the wee hours. We're hard at work subtly undermining conventional ideas of reality... and having fun while we do it.

In dark times, is it enough to simply pursue what you enjoy? Maybe it is, but I like to think there's a little more to what we're doing than a pleasurable literary pastime. I agree with James Baldwin:
“You write in order to change the world…. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.”
Our eighth episode (just out this week) is this story written and read by me:

The December Ninth Study

"Amid fits of laughter and clouds of pot smoke, Dave and I would debate: Do thoughts have density? What is the weight of sadness, the volume of anger?..."

Is this story a glimpse of a vast synchronistic web of invisible interconnections, or is it mostly a convoluted but loving tribute to John Lennon? You decide.

And listen to the author interview (of a sort) that follows. A smile is good.

All you need is....

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

My Radio Interview


I had a very enjoyable time being interviewed by my friend Bonnie Lykes-Bigler on The Writers' Voice radio show on WIOX, 91.3FM, Roxbury, NY. For the first half-hour, we talked about writing and publishing: my past influences, my current projects, my creative process. We touched on both Bliss Plot Press and The Strange Recital. In the second half, I got to read from the beginning of my novel in progress, Ponckhockie Union. The whole thing was a lot of fun!

Maybe there's something in this hour of audio you can learn from, be inspired by, or just use to ward off boredom. Please listen and tell me your thoughts. Just click here:
https://soundcloud.com/user-262879014/sets/brent-robison-wiox-the-writers

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Refresh My Memory

"Benson Randall awoke one morning with someone else's memories..."

How can you be absolutely sure that your "memories" are not just a broadcast your brain is receiving? Or an accidental download of someone else's thoughts? Is a "self" just a life story?

Listen to me read my new short story on The Strange Recital, a fiction podcast I co-host with my friend Tom Newton. Plus an interview (of a sort) afterward.


More to come about The Strange Recital!

Friday, March 4, 2016

A Journey into the Dark Woods

There is a myth that by middle age, one is fully formed; growth should be finished, the mountain scaled, the work done. Fred Poole’s memoir, The Aqua Mustang: Detours Into My Past, puts the lie to that idea. He looks back thirty years to when he was fifty, a time of powerful change rather than of resting on laurels, of conscious forward movement rather than a tired surrender to stasis.

In an introspective narrative voice that reminded me of strongly subjective first-person novels like Knut Hamsun’s Hunger or Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, Poole weaves a story that travels from dim childhood memories in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, to exotic international dangers, to New York City’s streets, art museums, and ACOA rooms, and back again to rural New England. But the journey is not about geography. It is a journey of self-awareness.

It takes courage to hunt down and confront the phantoms in one’s own psyche, to dive like Beowulf to battle the monsters at the bottom of the lake -- to kill Grendel and his mother and lift the longtime curse from the kingdom of the self. That’s what Fred Poole is doing on his bike around the streets of Manhattan, and in his aqua Mustang on the shadowy country roads of his family history. His story is his own, but it’s also classic. As John Yorke says in The Atlantic (Jan 1, 2016): “In stories throughout the ages there is one motif that continually recurs—the journey into the woods to find the dark but life-giving secret within.”

I'm pleased to have made this video to promote The Aqua Mustang: