New mag, pristine poster, at Empty Bottle Tuesday

Can’t say much about the new zine from the folks at Two With Water, other than it looks like Nick Sarno from the Green Lantern Press might well have something to do with it, as I haven’t seen a copy, but the poster for their Chicago launch party is simple but stellar, methinks.
Party’s next week, [...]

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Nervier than thou? The Broad Set Writing Collective

I think they might well be among the more nervy of the young-ish writerly set in action today, perhaps even with nerves of steel or, if not, aluminum, at least. I’ve corresponded with several members in recent history via THE2NDHAND submissions and zine trades and, if I can’t say much else, I’d advise to keep an eye out for their work, mostly originating in N.J. (oh a-and in the credits to their 4th edition of the Lo-Fidelity zine, they put a shout-out to “role model” Dr. Mickey Hess, THE2NDHAND’s FAQ editor, longtime compatroit and lately a prof at Rider University in Lawrenceville). Among them are onetime (and soon-to-be-two-time) THE2NDHAND contributor Peter Richter and, likewise, Glen Binger. Their Lo-Fidelity zine brings together the work of many, with a single writer featured more widely in each edition. Prose writer and poet Lauren Cerand made up the bulk of the No. 4, out this year.

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Nerves of steel? — reading Nov. 9 @ Whistler, and more

Given the rumor, innuendo and subsequent confusion that have all accompanied the run-up to the very real reading series from THE2NDHAND that launches next week, Monday, Nov. 9, at Whistler in Chicago’s Logan Square, it’s hard to pin down exactly when and where the question in its title — “So you think you have nerves [...]

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Two salvos — 14 years apart

A couple blasts here, one from the recent past and the other more distant. I’ve had a good time in most instances — sometimes too good — but it hasn’t always been so easy. In Birmingham now a little over a week ago our “Extraordinary Rendition” of a reading went quite well, and for the first time I can prove at least a part of that statement with video, shot live at Greencup Books that fine Sept. 11. It’s my “Dreams of a Thriller” story, which you probably heard first in a blog post from weeks back, and the vid’s embedded below….

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Wirthlin on Cellstories Thursday, Milam on Twitter Friday

Couple new things upcoming in the way of mobile fiction experimentation, namely the first CellStories.net contribution from THE2NDHAND, David Wirthlin’s “Nine Items From Your Disappearance,” to be broadcast via the exclusively mobile literary short site Thursday; Doug Milam, in turn, will be engaging his Twitter feed in our second live itinerary this Friday here. Follow him for the goods, though we’ll be publishing the results, er… would posthumously be the right word here? Assuming most microblog posts officially die after a few minutes, of course.

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CellStories launch (& Annalemma redesign)

When my former colleague at the Chicago Reader, venerable “Hot Type” columnist Mike Miner, wrote about  Punk Planet Books editor and publisher Dan Sinker, in turn a friend and colleague in lit-punk stuff, I knew it had to be about something good. Appropriately, I came across Miner’s eventual column about Dan — “A Short Story [...]

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The nonchalance of the King

Check out these pictures of Spencer Dew (left, with Opium magazine’s Todd Zuniga on the right in both), taken during and at the end of, respectively, the Literary Death Match at the July 31, 2009, Printers’ Ball. Taken  by Stacee Droege and procured via Jill Summers, they’re part of a larger collection at the Silver [...]

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Remainders and reminders — and Spencer Dew conquers at Literary Death Match

Divide 25 by 8, the number of broadsheets THE2NDHAND’s published since September 11, and you get 3 with a remainder of one, the number of readings we have ever scheduled on that date, before or since. Sept. 11, 2009, join us back in Birmingham for a release event for broadsheet 32, featuring a short story [...]

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Dreams of a thriller

I was thinking about my childhood, I guess, on the long ride home from work two weeks back, all the things that have fallen apart over the years, the notion of one day achieving rock or pop stardom a la early 1980s Michael Jackson, the other silly dreams of being a fireman, a policeman, a [...]

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Nice finds — new writers and old wristwatches

I found a watch recently — a somewhat nice watch, in fact — on Birmingham’s south side. The timepiece, fairly scuffed-up in several spots along the outer edges and band and no longer ticking, took only a visit to the watchman’s kiosk in a local mall to confirm that it needed no more than a battery to [...]

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