Contributors
Issue 2: Broken Things
Tom Barbash (Scratch) was a winner of the California Book Award for his novel The Last Good Chance. He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller On Top of the World. His short fiction has appeared in Tin House, Story, The Virginia Quarterly Review and other publications.
Blame Sally's (If You Tell A Lie) music has been described as emotionally charged, passionate, highly melodic, and compelling. An all-female quartet with “a unique command over the song,” Blame Sally is Pam Delgado, Renee Harcourt, Jeri Jones and Monica Pasqual. San Francisco's Chronicle called their self-produced/self-released album “intelligently emotional, intricately harmonized folk-pop” with “imaginatively arranged, expansive narrative songs…” Visit them at www.blamesally.com.
Andrea Bunch (Earthworms) plays with Aerin Tedesco in an anti-folk duo out of Chicago. Their songwriting and acoustic playing are enhanced by found sounds and original samples. The two work at The Old Town School of Folk Music, and so draw from a wide range of traditional and modern influences.
Jennifer Chapis (The Ex Reflects) holds an MFA from New York University, where she is currently full-time faculty. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Hayden's Ferry Review, McSweeney's (online), Minnesota Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Spoon River Poetry Review, and others. Her broadside was printed with The Center for Book Arts. Chapis is a co-founder and editor of Nightboat Books.
Hugh D'Andrade (Mind the Gap) is an artist and agitator based in San Francisco. He has been infuriating ordinary, patriotic Americans since the first Gulf War. www.hughillustration.com.
darkblueworld (Undone) combines confessional songwriting with cinematic compositions including distorted guitars, hard-hitting beats, an occasional cello, and their signature haunting harmonies and music boxes, resulting in radio-friendly prowls through dark pop.
Marion de Booy Wentzien's (Games You Can Play with the Dead) fiction has won the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award twice and The New Letters Literary Award. Her short stories have appeared in Story magazine, Seventeen, the San Francisco Chronicle, Scholastic Books and many national publications. She is the author of over 300 published short stories and one novel.
Spencer Dew's (Wake) work has appeared or is forthcoming in Diagram, Cautionary Tale, Sexy Stranger, 3AM Magazine, and Word Riot. He lives in Chicago, completing a novel.
Carmaig de Forest (George Bush Lies) is a California-bred, ukulele-playing, punk-folk-singer-songwriter-storyteller-performance-artist. He currently lives in Washington, DC though he's about to move to Philadelphia.
Esther Ehrlich (Afloat excerpt) is a writer in Berkeley, California who is completing her first book, a memoir entitled, Afloat. She was most recently published in The Sun.
Tom Erikson (Valencia Gardens) is an independent photographer who has worked out of San Francisco for over twenty years. He has photographed a lot of things, but makes his living making portraits. Musicians and families are his specialty.
Grant Faulkner (Broken Pretty Things) has taken photos of mannequins all over the U.S., much to the amusement of the women who work in wig shops. "But why do you want to take their pictures?" a clerk in a Reno, NV, wig shop asked him. A very good question.
Julie Feinstein (Married Man) is a writer and performance artist living in Oakland, CA. While she has had many news, arts, and travel articles published in a variety of media outlets, this is her first time being accepted into a literary journal. She is pleased to be in such distinguished company, and would like to invite everyone over for tea.
Nigel French (Stan & Trampling Free Speech) is the non-fiction editor of The Big Ugly Review. He is the director of the Graphic & Interactive Design program at UC Berkeley Extension and a partner in San Franciscio design firm 17 Reasons Design.
Stephen Hemenway (patch-work) lives in San Francisco. He is an MFA candidate at at San Francisco State University. He is trying to put together a thesis so he can graduate in the Spring.
John Milton Hendricks (The Pilot Light) is a librarian currently writing in San Francisco. Recent work may be found at Easy Living in the Information Age and in Bear Book II.
Cristina Henríquez (The Baby) is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her stories have appeared in TriQuarterly, AGNI online, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She lives in Dallas, where she recently finished work on her first short story collection.
Christina Hutchins (Why We Need to be Together) is a California poet and philosopher of religion and culture. She has worked in a sewage treatment plant, as a biochemist, a Congregational (UCC) minister, and currently serves as adjunct faculty at the Pacific School of Religion. Recent poems appear in Prairie Schooner, Absomaly, 88, Nimrod, North American Review, Tampa Review, in anthologies (HarperSF, Milkweed, Ashgate, Houghton-Mifflin), and a chapbook, Collecting Light, was published in 1999 by Acacia Books. Why We Need to be Together first appeared in The Tampa Review.
Stacy Nathaniel Jackson (Mulch) is a visual artist and poet based in San Francisco. After a lucky break from an unlucky economy, he recently “left” corporate finance to pursue visual and literary art full time. To view more of his work, please visit www.snjackson.com.
Ben Lerman F(I)X attended Mills College some years ago and earned an MFA (it stands for Most Futile Attainment). Nobody has ever suggested he give up his day, night and weekend job as an ER doctor.
Dixon Long (Harry Breaking) came to the Bay Area in 1990 from Cleveland, Ohio. He is the co-author with his wife Ruthanne of Markets of Provence (HarperCollins, 1996) and Markets of Paris (Balade Books, 2002). His novel Brothers was published by Creative Arts Book Company in 2001.
Kirk Lynn (Some Advice on Reading Short Stories) is a founder and co-producing artistic director of the theatre collective Rude Mechanicals. Kirk's adaptation of Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century was produced Off-Broadway in 2000 and has since toured nationally and internationally. Kirk's most recent play, How Late It Was How Late, adapted from James Kelman's Booker Prize-winning novel, tours the Philly Live Arts Festival this Fall.
Amy MacLennan (William's Geography) has been published in Cimarron Review, Rattle, South Dakota Review, Folio, and Wisconsin Review. One of her poems was included in So Luminous the Wildflowers, An Anthology of California Poets (Tebot Bach). The tofu in her diet helps to keep her nails strong (and her coat shiny).
Sharon Lynn Osmond (Woman at the Window) designs and installs gardens in the East Bay. She lives in Oakland with her husband, Dennis, her indoor cat, Bone Crusher, and her thick garden, Green Thought, which is populated by manikins, finches, towhees, bushtits, and robins.
Tony Palmieri (Sweet Tooth) is a filthy, barefoot giant who lives in the wilds of Connecticut with his carnival-freak children and a clever fairy princess. He likes big trees, messy-haired piano players and red meat. No one should believe a word he says. Ever.
Erik Pearson (Everything Needs Fixing) studied music composition at Oberlin Conservatory. He has received awards and commissions for chamber music compositions that have been performed around the US, and has been praised in local press for scores and soundscapes written for San Francisco and New York choreographers. In addition, He is currently a member of the teaching staff at the Community Music Center in San Francisco.
Ken Samuels (Boy, You're Gonna Carry That Weight) lives in San Francisco. He is the author of an ongoing autobiographical 'zine, Uncorrected Proof.
Edward Smallfield 1 (2.23.04) is the author of The Pleasures of C and the coauthor of One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, a book-length collaboration with Doug MacPherson. His poems have appeared or will appear in Five Fingers Review, 26, Traverse, Volt and many other magazines.
Mai Linh Spencer (The Piñata) grew up in NYC and now lives in Berkeley, CA with her partner and two young daughters. "The Piñata" is her first published story.
Ellen Havre Weis (from Shoemaker Forever) writes short fiction and the occasional travel piece. Her newest book, Berkeley: The Life and Spirit of a Remarkable Town, with photographs by Kiran Singh, hit bookstores in August 2004. She lives in Oakland, CA with her husband and son. Poor Circulation, People Like Me, Questions Like Mine, and Dependencies are part of her forthcoming short story collection, Shoemaker Forever.
Patti Witten (April Fool) has earned more than 30 honors from a long list of international and regional song contests including Billboard, Woody Guthrie, Great American, and Indie Acoustic Project. “April Fool” is a recent demo, unreleased. www.pattiwitten.com