Author Spotlight: Gina Frangello

Gina Frangello is the author of the novel My Sister's Continent (2006) and the collection Slut Lullabies (2010). She is the editor of the collection Falling Backwards: Stories of Fathers and Daughters (2004), and she co-edited the collection Men Undressed: Women Writers on the Male Sexual Experience (2011). She is the fiction editor of The Nervous Breakdown, co-founder and Executive Editor of Other Voices Books, and she teaches creative writing at Columbia College and Northwestern University's School of Continuing Studies. Her next book, A Life in Men will be released in 2013 by Algonquin Books.

As relaxed and unpretentious as she is, Gina would probably laugh and disagree if you called her out on being a little bit of a super-mom, but she not only writes, edits, publishes, and teaches; she's also a busy wife and mother with three kids at home. Like many of my favorite authors, she lets her family inform her writing, and it's clear if you spend more than five minutes around her that they enrich her life as much as we can be sure having her enriches theirs.

Aside from her arsenal of writing projects and teaching/editorial duties, and of course being the mom that we all (including us men) wish we could be, she also has contributed to just an astonishing number of interviews, guest blog appearances, articles, essays, and so forth online; everywhere from the Chicago Tribune to the Huffington Post. When I say "astonishing" I mean go to Google's search page and type in any random phrase, like "Irish jug band music" and you can be sure that at some point Gina has had something nuanced, incisive, and on-point to say about it that you'll wish you had thought of first. I'm only half-joking about this.

Readers of my blog will remember that her collection Slut Lullabies was one of my two favorite books of 2010 (tied with The Hunger Games), and I have a second copy of it on my bookshelf that I rescued from the diabolical clutches of Davis Schneiderman's book-dunking guillotine apparatus during Printer's Ball 2011. At first I thought I might lend out the second orphan copy but now I think I'm just going to keep both of them and make you buy your own. You'll thank me later.

Author Spotlight: Jason Fisk

Photo by Jason Pettus

Jason Fisk says he prefers the term writer to poet, and after having read much of his body of work, I tend to agree. His stories and poems tread much common ground, and both his poetic sensibility and clear love of storytelling refuse to be outshone by each other. He is the author of the poetry collection: The Fierce Crackle of Fragile Wings (2011), the chapbooks Decay (2011) The Sagging: Spirits and Skin (2009), and Trapped Within Myself (2009), as well as a fascinating book of fiction that sort of defies description called Salt Creek Anthology (2011). Salt Creek Anthology, you may remember, was the subject of some buzz earlier this year for being released in a hand-made box, with the reader encouraged to shuffle the book's pages (each page a single micro-fiction standalone sliver of a larger story) and read it out of order, giving the reader a truly one-of-a-kind and potentially unrepeatable experience of reading the book.

Like past guests Ben Tanzer and Davis Schneiderman, Fisk is also a dad, and this fact is not lost on his audience. Families and, perhaps more specifically, the proverbial ones-we-love figure prominently in his work. The contemplative way he approaches this subject brings roaring, sustaining relevance to otherwise disarmingly quiet, understated prose and poems. He also doesn't shy away from tackling the harder-to-swallow moments of everyday life in a masterful way that will leave you feeling at first like everything's going to be okay, and later like maybe you aren't so sure.

While I'm thinking of it, note that three of the books above were released in 2011, which makes this year something a hat-trick for Fisk.With so much recent work you might imagine he's relatively new to writing, but you'd be very wrong about that. His poetry and/or prose has been featured in ChicagoPoetry.com, remark, Black Book Press, Blowback Magazine, True Poet Magazine, Showcase Press - Online Journal, Literary Fever, decomP, Word Riot, Litsnack, Boston Literary Magazine, Alternating Current, Breadcrumb Scabs, Ex Cathedra... (deep breath) ...Leaf Garden Press, Mastodon Dentist, The Medulla Review, Midwest Literary Magazine, The Circle Magazine, Zygote In My Coffee, Tamafyhr Mountain Poetry, Underground Voices, Laura Hird Poetry Showcase, Thieves Jargon, The Orange Room Review, This Zine Will Change Your Life, What to Wear During an Orange Alert, Origami Condom, Nibble, Pure Francis, See You're Not Really Reading This Anymore Are You This List Is Just Enormous I Could Type Anything Here And You'd Never Even See It Banana Sheboygan Darth Vader Applesauce Twelve Cockpit Elephant Sombrero, Nerve Cowboy, Oak Bend Review, In Between Altered States, Gloom Cupboard, Experiments in Manhood, and New York Quarterly.

Whew.

Author Spotlight: Ben Tanzer

Father, writer, and blogger Ben Tanzer is, as CCLaP editor Jason Pettus refers to him, arguably the hardest working man in Chicago. He is the author of the novels Lucky Man (2007), Most Likely You'll Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine (2008), You Can Make Him Like You (2011), and My Father's House (2011), the story collection Repetition Patterns (2008), the standalone story Cool, Not Removed (2010), and the collection of essays on running and writing called 99 Problems (2010).

In addition to a slew of excellent, well-recieved books under his belt, he's responsible for This Blog Will Change Your Life, the centerpiece of what he calls a "vast media empire" that encompasses book reviews (This Book Will Change Your Life), posted short fiction (This Zine Will Change Your Life) and regularly-held semi-drunken impromptu interviews with authors (This Podcast Will Change Your Life). He can also be found at a variety of reading series throughout Chicago and elsewhere, including past appearances at the very popular Orange Alert Reading Series, Reading Under the Influence, Quickies!, and So You Think You Have Nerves of Steel?

But as if all of this weren't enough for any non-superhero, Ben is also a devoted father and husband to his family, who figure prominently in his written work. His love for them, and their influence on his personality, bleeds through particularly in his newest books My Father's House and You Can Make Him Like You. He is an avid runner, and when I say "avid" I mean, "borderline obsessive", if, that is, his fascinating commentary about running and writing 99 Problems is to be believed. Given what's already on his plate, we can only presume he runs from 2:30-4:30 AM while the rest of us are just entering REM sleep. Incredibly, and this is an achievement that even he modestly plays down, he also just won an Emmy award for co-writing an award-winning public service announcement to help prevent child abuse.

At the Outset

Writers and Friends,

The idea for Breakfast With the Author came to me one night after attending one of my favorite reading series in the city, Orange Alert. Following the readings, I sat for what must have been 2-3 hours with a few of my writer friends and we drank and talked shop about writing. The environment was so relaxed, the company so utterly great, that we soon forgot how long we'd been there. As we reluctantly pulled ourselves away from this impromptu little gathering, it occurred to me how uniquely friendly and welcoming the Chicago literature scene is, and what a shame it was that not every writer, no matter where they live or what the creative climate in their hometown is, has access to such fun, informal, candid, enriching dialogue with other authors. Breakfast With the Author is my attempt to bring this sit-down, this little insider moment, to the rest of the world, and I very much hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

I'm posting this today exactly one year after the initial pilot podcast appeared. In that time, it has gone from just a basic vague idea to the sort of thing people know about me before we've even met, which continues to delight and astound me. I'd like to take a moment at the outset to thank my wife for being so supportive of this project and offer a kind thank you to all of the writers and editors who took the time to come and have breakfast with me. I make the show, but it's you that make it happen.

-Mark

Episode 4: Paul Hughes, Russell Lutz and Len Nicholas

Episode 4: Guests Paul Hughes, Russell Lutz and Len Nicholas

Episode 3: Davis Schneiderman and Lawrence Santoro

Episode 3: Guests Davis Schneiderman and Lawrence Santoro

Episode 2: Gina Frangello and Kathleen Rooney

Episode 2: Guests Gina Frangello and Kathleen Rooney

Episode 1: Ben Tanzer and Jason Fisk

Episode 1: Guests Ben Tanzer and Jason Fisk