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In The Monster’s Mouth

In The Monster’s Mouth

By Michael Scott

http://woodenrocketpress.com

The arms of the Wooden Rocket move slowly.  Eventually my hand is taken.  Something cold and hard coils about my wrist.  I climb the stairs, into the glimmer.  Trying to blink the light out of my eyes, I see only the grand, formless white.

The tree speaks to me, “your iris isn’t strong enough yet. Give yourself time.”

So here I am.  Feeling like I’m in the belly of the beast, but surely, still barely past its lips.  It has been six weeks now.  My head hurts, and I can’t really breath, but I’m seeing the first few basic shapes, the outline of something magnificent, and David, the beating heart of this monster, is offering to host my blog.

Back in the real world, it’s new years eve, but in here. . . it’s dawn.

Circuits are being rewired.  Breakers switches being replaced.  Star charts are being redrawn.  Fuel is being sourced.  Voices are being raised in both argument and song.  We’re taking our little space ship to the god damned moon over here, and were going via the Orian Nebula, so buckle the hell up, and try not to get blown out an air lock.

I can’t say much right now — because I’m still seeing everything in low contrast, high luminous grey scale — but, fiction fans, if I were you, I’d bookmark us, in the new year.  Dave and I have big plans for this place.  We’ve got five new books on the horizon for 2011, including the new volume of Blank State, and a sinister little work of my own creation, but that’s not even the bark of the oak tree.

Between book launches, and gigantic announcements, I’ll be here, in the monster’s mouth, blind and furious, creating content for you as hard as I bloody well can.  If you swing by every couple of weeks, I’ll try to keep you entertained.

by

Michael Scott

http://woodenrocketpress.com

follow me on twooter @woodrocketmike

Book Review: Manifestations, by Liz Worth

Book Review: Manifestations, by Liz Worth

by Michael Scott

http://woodenrocketpress.com/

About half way through this one, I lit a candle.  My apartment is a comfortable temperature, and the light quite good for reading, but to survive my midnight journey through Liz Worth’s Manifestations, I needed some extra warmth and glow.

Manifestations introduces itself as a collection of poems.  Each piece tells you something different about your illness, or your environment.  One piece tells you why you can’t write, another tells why you can’t sleep, why you only breath smoke, why you stopped going to work.  Quickly a character begins to emerge.  The poems become a sparse, minimal, but carefully crafted short story.

Worth’s sickening, second person narrative hung dankly about me like a fog.  She told me I was an alcoholic, a hypochondriac, and a suicide risk.  Being addressed as this character, told about my loneliness and paranoia, reminded me of my own plagues.  Pin worms in third grade.  Head lice my second year of high school.  Two and a half years of bed-bugs, in the old shoe factory at 90 Ontario St.  A small battle with a family of mice, in the spring of last year.  While I’m not currently infested with anything, I do still, from time to time, itch.

Reading Manifestations beautifully recalled that itching.  The character is not particularly sympathetic and the prose are so deeply descriptive and miserable that they frequently seem indulgent.  In a few places, it was as struggle to keep reading.  I wanted to abandon the character to the self-imposed isolation and desperation, just like everyone else in the fictional world had done.

But an admiration for the form kept me going.

I folded the book into my lap, checked my skin for bugs, lit my little candle and kept reading.  Worth’s prose were even, simple, and powerfully evocative.  The use of second person voice opened a tiny window of sympathy into this hateful character, reminding me of my own most selfish and desperate hours.  As each new crumb of narrative exposed itself carefully, from between lines of vivid self pity, I felt suitably rewarded.  In the final few paragraphs, Worth is able to reveal both the beginning and ending of her story simultaneously. I left the story, carrying a subtle and satisfying clarity.

Manifestations is certainly not a joy to read, but is quite a splendid little book.  If one is going to write correctly about suicide, perhaps it should be inflated, stressful and pathetic.  There is an achievement here in the merging of form with content, in the sparse, clean prose, and in a simply presented, perfectly weighted climax.  I am happy to recommendManifestations.

By Michael Scott

Buy Liz Worth’s books @ http://www.lizworth.com/

Or buy our books @ http://woodenrocketpress.com/

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Book Review: These Are Not Movies: screenplays for films that will never be made.

Book Review: These Are Not Movies: screenplays for films that will never be made.

By Michael Scott

http://woodenrocketpress.com

In the Naco Gallery at 1665 Dundas Street — enjoying a dirty little Americano, and the blustery aftershock of yesterdays snow storm — I have read the last fifty pages of Adam Tomlinson’s exquisitely packaged collection of screenplays: These Are Not Movies. The volume contains nine commissions from an apparent who’s who pantheon of Ottawa’s small press community.  Each short story, whether by accident or design, is an exquisite and personal rumination on the theme of loneliness.  It is scarcely possible to review the screen plays individually, because all of the work is so clean, and precise.  Characters are dexterously, and believably voiced.  Plots are carefully mapped.  All nine of our stories are told crisply and with a minimum of fat.

As I read through the volume, I felt a warmth growing in my heart.  I felt that, just by listening to these fictional people explain, desperately, their varying feelings of isolation, I was somehow helping them.  Like “Nell” in J.B. Staniforth’s “Inertia,” it was both my honour, and duty, to rise, in that moment, and give of myself to someone else.  It mattered little to me that those others, to whom I was being so supportive, were fictional, and could never know me.  In fact, this made my dedication to them even more selfless.

I had begun to wonder, though, before I sat down today, if the contributers to These Are Not Movies, had missed a unique opportunity.  The mandate of the piece was to present screen plays as short stories, to create movies that would “never be made.”  Was there not a chance here to create a movie that was actually, completely unfilmable, and still have it reach an audience?  The first five of these scripts, were not only plausible, but — owing to their small casts, focused, minimalist story lines, an obedience to classical unities — actually cheep, easy, and deeply interesting ideas for movies.

I was not disappointed with todays read which, began with “Itch of Idealism,” by Colin White and Adam Tomlinson.  The sweet story, within a story, within a story — of a prickish mouse, and a turtle that destroyed the Earth — provided the surrealistic element that I had been craving.  From there things just got stranger, and the volume climaxed with a beautiful and sickeningly crafted mutual-rape-style love scene, between an aristocratic junky and his piano.  I rest now, assured that sequence could never, regardless of budget, skill, or planing, ever be filmed by anyone.

I felt compelled, by the inertia of this book, to read all the way to the final page, where — in Tomlinson’s biographical note — his posthumous dedication to his grandmother, finished my reading experience by putting a pleasant, biter sweet lump in my throat.

Highlights include “All The Single Dragon Slayers,” by Jennifer Whiteford, “Itch of Idealism,” by Colin White and Adam Tomlinson, and “Play,” by Michael Reid.

Raouf Lefy’s “Their Blue Glow Flickers,” was very likely brilliant, but I failed to grasp most of in on my first read, and so will have to look at it again after the weekend.

Buy the book @ http://www.40wattspotlight.com/movies_front.html

or buy other books @ http://www.woodenrocketpress.com/