Brad Listi is one of those people you might describe as irrepressible; I’ve long admired his Other People Podcast for his candor and the show’s freewheeling nature, its road-trip-like willingness to go anywhere, take entertaining detours, and pull up short at roadside attractions. He also happens to be thoughtful and an excellent interlocutor. I was excited for the chance to appear on the show and talk to him about the role of landscape in my work, as well as bibliomania, my obsession with cities, estuaries, Howard Stern, bridge climbers, my stint in a psychiatric hospital, and other topics too sundry to list. You can see how these all got strung together into a single conversation here: http://otherpeoplepod.com/archives/1827.
First things first–Peter Tieryas (a writer whose own work I admire, author of the collection Watering Heaven) wrote perhaps the most unorthodox review of Understories to date for Punchnel’s Journal, in which he seized upon the almost-title story, “The Understory,” as a leaping-off point for re-examining his own relationship to Heidegger’s philosophy, and his attempts many years ago at Berkeley to grapple with Heidegger’s Nazi affiliations. http://www.punchnels.com/first-person/heidegger-and-the-understory/.
Peter and his wife Angela are also brilliant filmmakers, and he’s taken the further step of transforming his review/memoir/essay into a video which he connects his experience to the stories and steeps us in additional layers of incredible imagery. I can only marvel, express my gratitude, and hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Also, you haven’t truly lived till you’ve seen Heidegger walking toward himself.
On February 11th, I read with Margarita Korol, Dylan Nice, Karolina Waclawiak, and Lars Iyer at the Franklin Park Reading Series, hosted by the fabulous Penina Roth. I decided to go with a work-in-progress, a story about a couple of composers with a lifelong rivalry that involves a subway accident and some flirtation over borscht; more, I cannot reveal.
I’ve got a new story, “Bridge Poses,” coming out in the latest New South, which is fresh from the printers and will be available at AWP. It was a pleasure working with Matt Sailor and the other editors on the story, and I’m looking forward to diving into the whole issue. Zachary Cox did the snazzy cover. Meet the troublemakers behind New South and pick up a copy at Booth 1005 at the Book Fair. http://newsouthjournal.com/
The folks at the Short Form, a new but robust site that celebrates the short story, threw me some great questions and turned Clay Enos’s author photo of me into a cartoon. What more could I ask for? http://www.theshortform.com/interview/tim-horvath
Understories showed up on a handful of Best of 2012 lists, and I figured I’d round ’em up and corral them in one spot. Here they are, with copious dollops of gratitude to everyone who read, reviewed, or rated the book, to anyone whose to-read or maybe pile it wormed itself into, to those who have spread the word, attended a reading, or might do so down the road. And to you for reading this far.
Matt Bell collared it, along with Diane Williams’s Vicky Swanky is a Beauty, as one of his two favorite collections of the year at http://www.mdbell.com/post/3925923266….
Jennifer Spiegel gave it a special accolade at her end of the year blog in the delightful category of “Book Most Outside My Usual Fare That I Think You Should Read Because It’s Wildly Imaginative, Acutely Intelligent, The Prose Is Striking, and It’s Intellectually Stimulating.” http://jenniferspiegel.com/www.jennif…
I felt like I was hiking up the side of a mountain while reading “Battleborn,” seduced by its moment-by-moment gifts and vistas such that the breath-shortening effects of altitude stole up on me. Her sentences can be mesmerizing in the way of mineral patterns, but in her characters the lava is very much alive, palpable in their longings for companionship, self-understanding, dignity. And just when we’ve acclimated ourselves to her craggy contemporary West, she gives us the novella “The Diggings,” akin to Denis Johnson’s “Train Dreams” in the ease and visionary verve with which it transports us utterly to another era.
I could’ve gone on and on about this book, but suffice it to say that it is a book I’ll be rereading for years to come. More excitement: she’s coming to read at the New Hampshire Institute of Art, where I teach, in April.
I participated in a three-way discussion with Gabriel Blackwell, Jensen Beach, and Andrew Ervin at The Philadelphia Review of Books, entitled “Inventing the Tools of Our own Evolution.” The three parts of the interview are here: part 1, part 2 and part 3.
My first novel is tentatively titled The Desert of Maine, and you can get a taste of me reading an excerpt from it at none other than the Desert of Maine itself.
My story “Woodrow Wilson” appeared on Melville House Publishing’s site as part of the series Their Peculiar Ambitions, curated by Amber Sparks and Brian Carr. Each story in the series revolves around a particular American president, and mine is about Edith Wilson, Woodrow’s second wife, and arguably, after her husband’s stroke, for a short while our first woman president. Read “Woodrow Wilson” here.
