Issue Twenty-Three Contributors

 

Patty Somlo has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times and was a finalist in the Tom Howard Short Story Contest. She is the author of From Here to There and Other Stories. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including the Los Angeles Review, the Santa Clara Review, the Jackson Hole Review, WomenArts Quarterly, Guernica, Slow Trains, The Write Room and Fringe Magazine, and in several anthologies, including Solace in So Many Words, Being Human: Call of the Wild and Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration.

Michael S Gatlin grew fast and soon developed a love for the sound and the fury of existence. He wrote songs and sang in a band. But alas was tone deaf and took to writing poetry. This led him to wander the depraved streets in search of experience to corrupt what was left of his innocence. After graduating high school, the last of his social obligations, Michael joined the carnival and traveled across Canada working for Bungee USA. He worked as a carnie for a half a year before settling down in Montreal. He wrote a memoir about his experience entitled “Carnivorous in Canada“. The following year, after a stint in New York and Knoxville, Mr. Gatlin moved to Nashville and joined a cult: The First Interplanetary Church of the Immaculate Deception. Their motto is Absurdity Shall be the Whole of the Law. During this time he wrote a lot of poetry and performed on stage with a group of wild Plaguists led by His Assholiness Pope Jas, the First and Last. The characters he met there have been immortalized in his second novel “Heavenly Nobodies“. Burnt out on too much LSD, alcohol and narcotics, but especially LSD, Michael decided to live in his car for a spell, so he traveled up the eastern seaboard and burnt his flesh on the beaches, begged on the streets, and slept in his car for three months until he reached New York and the air conditioned safety of his mother. Reminded of how much he dislikes safety and comfort, Mr. Gatlin took a four day train trip to Montana to visit some childhood friends. Here he found work for the National Forest Services clearing switchback trails. The winter came, and Michael decided to head for Seattle. In Seattle he found more drugs and sex than he could refuse, so after a few months he took a train back to Penn Station. After a few years, and a few odd jobs, Michael found himself owning a bar/restaurant/lounge on the Lower East Side with a couple of friends. The bar he named Verlaine, after Rimbaud. The bar opened in October of 2001 and has been going strong ever since. This year Michael and his beautiful wife Bonnie, celebrated the birth of their first child Ovid Miles Gatlin. Now the early mornings, hallucinating and covered in vomit have a much more precious meaning.

I write whenever lightning strikes, connecting my counsciousness to the greater world of human diminishment and  suffering. I find so many of us are declasse, undeservedly fallen lower than the dreams we had concocted about ourselves.

William C. Blome is a writer of short fiction and poetry.  He beds down nightly in-between Baltimore and Washington, DC, and he is an MA graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars.  His work has previously seen the light of day in such fine little mags as Amarillo Bay, Prism International, Taj Mahal Review, Pure Francis, This, Salted Feathers and The California Quarterly. Blome prefers to create first drafts of his work in public places; railroad stations and fast food restaurants can often be particularly good spots.  His favorite authors include T.E. Hulme, Gertrude Stein, and Frederick Barthelme.  William C. Blome is also a fine collagist.  No locale in the United States has had a more positive influence on his creativity than North Dakota (which he longs to see again someday).  

Tobi Cogswell is a two-time Pushcart nominee.  Credits include Illya’s Honey, REAL, Iodine Poetry Journal, Slipstream, StepAway (UK), Turbulence (UK), Front Porch Review, Rufous Salon (Sweden), Alligator Stew (UK), Crack the Spine and Ballard Street Poetry Journal, and are forthcoming in Bacopa, Compass Rose, The Broken Plate, Border Crossing, I-70 Review, Incandescent (UK), Agenda Poetry (UK) and Pale House – Letters to Los Angeles. Her latest chapbook is “Surface Effects in Winter Wind”, (Kindred Spirit Press).  She is the co-editor of San Pedro River Review.

Clint Wilson is currently completing a masters in creative writing at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He is a graduate of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC and a native of Huntington, WV. His story, “Hyssop,” was accepted to the publication 3 to 4 Ounces, and his poem, “The Hot End,” is forthcoming in the Irish journal, Poetry Bus.