writer

Screenwriting Awards:

 

Lyric Essay:

 

Poetry (ask nicely and you may get a copy):

  • THE MANYFESTER –book of poems by Storm Garner, among which:

Friday Night Performance Theory (for Chelsey Minnis)

Fiction Translation: 

  • Vercoquin et le Plancton (1946) —Boris Vian‘s first novel, chock-full of neologisms, puns and other wordplay, ie very hard to translate! And fun! I am translating it from French into English, so that all my non-francophone friends can enjoy his wild and clever and heartening writing along with me. Michel Gondry, FYI, has made a film based on Vian’s second novel L’Écume des Jours (which I first read and fell in love with at age 13), so I hope this will eventually help the rest of the world outside of Francophonia to the phenomenal creative spirit that Boris Vian brought into our world before my time. (He was also a prolific jazz trumpet player and chanson writer & performer–look him up!)
35mm print by Alex MacKenzie, 2002

storm in a ball–35mm print by Alex MacKenzie, 2002

I cover ground slowly, a few yards at a time, less and less each day. Make myself small so I feel like I’m moving fast along crawling insects’ highways. Sometimes I crawl, dragging my water jug in the sand, hands cut up by cactus splinters, decades-old glass shards blown by sandstorms, sand in eyes, eyes on holes: holes homes of lizards, holes homes of snakes, holes jackrabbits’ hideouts, holes tarantulas lairs, scorpion’s caves, holes ants’ entrances to underground cavernous worlds immune to surface winds and howls, holes full of desert moths’ cocoons. It’s okay, there’s no one to watch me here. I rest frequently and lose count of days, lose sense of my mission to find a final resting place somewhere in this wild where wilderness will find some use for me.

I wake up to the cold slither of a vividly striped snake over both ankles. The snake is impossibly lustrous, like blown-glass, and appears not to feel my eyes, my pulse:

my body and the desert floor at midday must have analogous temperatures–

so I have already become landscape…

[excerpt from “Those Desert Holes“

published in the Writer’s Bloq Qarterly # 1, 2012]