Litquake

I've been sitting on this one for a while. I'll be reading for Joe and Justine Clifford's Lip Service West series at this year's Litquake. I'm really looking forward to this. I've been working hard on my piece, and I've had to improve my skills to pull this one off.

It deals with my relationship to violence and how I've alternately internalized and externalized rage, fear, and the need for control. It's forced me to look at myself and my life seriously, and to settle a whole set of internal conflicts that have eaten up a lot of my energy over the years. It also features what the Comics Code used to refer to as an 'injury-to-eye motif.'

What can I say? I write literary memoir, but I'm a pulp character.

A lot of artists who have a dramatic back story like mine wind up returning to their traumas over and over again because that's the material they have. I am not writing about my history and disabilities because that is my subject of choice. I am writing about them because it is one of the ways I'm healing myself. But I'm not going to spend the rest of my life obsessing over my issues. When I'm done with this material, I'm done with it.

So I have to do it right this time around.

If you look it up on the Litquake calendar, this show is called Gritty, Raw, and Real. I don't plan on letting down the team.