Heritage Writers Conference, May 18, 2013

Posted on April 3, 2013 by jack

http://heritagewriters.tripod.com/spring-workshop.html

I’ll be the keynote speaker at this conference on May 18. I’ll be running these two work shops as well:

Story, Structure, Style

First and Lasts, Characters and Their Objects

 

 

 

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Who Do You Listen To?

Posted on January 24, 2013 by jack

Who Do You Listen To?

After I came across a very brave and unique novel titled: Taliban Escape by Aabra  which was reviewed in The Dark Phantom Review, I remembered an exchange I had with a fellow writer and former student. I want to post it here for anyone visiting this blog as a reminder of why we write:

Writer: I’m trying hard to maintain the last bit of writing advice you provided, “write what you want, the way you want.” That’s hard, especially with two friends criticizing it. Right now, if I take them seriously, I need to go back and almost start over with my work-in-progress.”

JR: Yes, that’s a tough one. One short answer is to listen but choose what to change if anything. The way I see it, we have this ideal story in our heads. It’s endless, but when you write, the readers plug in what you write and if it doesn’t connect somewhere to the universal story, they get this disjunction and their pencils move. What that gives us then is the issue of who’s doing the writing. But even deeper is the question of vision–-readers want you to tell them the story they want to hear. It’s your job to tell them a story they’ve never heard. If you can’t get past the universal, then you add nothing to the inventory of art and vision. It’s the ones who teach through their writing who are important.
A longer answer might be here: Readers are conservative and they want to be safe. Unsafe writing makes them uncomfortable. Your critics probably attack your work either at the Story or the Style, but never at the Structural level. They have that right when you put it on the table, but you cannot listen to everything they say no matter how much you like them. Realize this: the need to be loved is so strong, most writers will abandon their vision in order to bring their story into synch with the safe and limiting minds of their readers. If you do this, you fall as a writer because you are no longer scaling the heights of creation and in so doing you acknowledge the stasis of existence–getting and spending–and you will always feel guilty about knowing what you have betrayed. Each of us is unique while being an evolved animal who shares an immense pool of history and truth with your fellows, but you are not them and the vision you carry as a writer is the exact thing that changes, as Rushdie reminds us, cucumbers into pickles. Think of the journey…a long road into light. It is easy to stay where you are, but at some point you have to turn your back on those following you and go directly to the light and say follow me…what you have, my friends, is a faded vision. They want to visit a museum. You want to create the object they go to the museum to see. No one will ever suggest that DaVinci should have colored the Mona Lisa’s robe pink. So? Who do you listen to? Shakespeare said it, I say it, be true to yourself. If yourself wants to be loved too much, then you will make the amends you need to make to be loved. But if you tell them, this is my vision, this was not here before, then you expand what is. As a writer, You bring an object to the museum. You have to. It is your job, as a writer, to bring, not an imitation to the Museum of Writing, but the real and very first piece of its kind. That is your obligation. Unfortunately it’s an obligation, that, if you meet it, won’t let you be normal. Resist the need to be loved. Be a writer of new things. Jack

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Updated Virtual Tour Schedule for Gabriela and The Widow

Posted on January 10, 2013 by jack

Gabriela and The Widow just blew into blogcritics.org for a fun-filled Q and A loaded with writing insights and personal revelations about the author. Thanks to Virginia Grenier. Check Gabriela out here:

Article first published as Spotlight Interview with Author Jack Remick on Blogcritics.
Also–Now Gabriela is in the PI.

Gabriela and The Widow is now available in paperback and kindle. The url is to the amazon page.

Gabriela’s Blog Tour, like all expeditionary excursions, undergoes itinerary changes according to the terrain, weather, and geo-political upheavals. Here is the url with the latest additions, deletions, changes, hopes, fears etc.:http://storiesforchildren.tripod.com/worldofinknetwork/jack-remick-jan-feb-13.html

American Chronicle and Andi’s Realm came off without a hitch. Thanks to all for visiting those stops.

Jack

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Silvio Reviews Blood on Goodreads

Posted on December 11, 2012 by jack

Silvio‘s review on Goodreads, posted Dec 11, 2012. Reposting.
Dec 11, 12
Like other reviews said, this book is not a romance, not by a long shot. It’s brutal, violent, gory, disturbing with detailed descriptions of many monstrous murders, real or imaginary, and the dark sides of human nature. Needless to say it’s not for the faint of heart. At times I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable. It’s no exaggeration to say that this book wore me out, mentally. However, it also can’t be denied that it’s an amazing book, the kind of book makes me become depressed but think about lots of things. And isn’t that is essentially the meaning of books?

I started this brilliant book without expecting an HEA, or even HFN, and sure enough, there isn’t anything like that. Nonetheless I like the ending, maybe because I think that an sad ending will stay in my heart long long after the story ends, and in that way I’d remember the book always.

I am very moved by the love between Henry and Squeaky. It pains me to see that they are no longer together. I won’t say that René hasn’t an important role in Henry’s time in prison and since then his ways of thinking and measuring life. And in a way, Henry loves him. But Squeaky, he is truly the love of his life. He’s puppy-like, helpless, dependent, in desperate need of someone to love and protect him in the brutality of prison filled with thieves, rapists and murderers. But he’s also adorable, innocent, caring and most of all, loves Henry to death. I genuinely marvel at the tenderness and affection of a cold-blooded killer towards his lover, his little pet. It’s really touching. Henry kills for him. Henry often compares him to a beautiful flower, an innocent angel, something pure, precious, born to be treasured.

He is a little flower with his own perfume and so I will immortalize him.

He stands in a shaft of bright light that rains down over him and in the light he shimmers and I expect to see him levitate, rise up into the beam of light.

Or

He will be as pure and simple coming out of Death in Venice as he was going in. He is purity itself—cut, tattooed, raped, beaten but still pure and holy. In his purity he is a paragon of patience and emptiness, his mouth a paean to perfection, his buttocks as delicious as the mouth of the Nubian in the Song of Solomon. The purity of the rose.

And the cover, I never saw any cover as meaningful as this one. It’s like the symbols of Henry’s life, the knife for the killings he has done, the ears for the intense love he feels for his lover. I’d give this book 4 stars if for no other reason than that gorgeous cover.

I HIGHLY recommend this book!

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Sarah Martinez Reviews “Blood”

Posted on December 2, 2012 by jack

Book Review: Blood by Jack Remick

Sarah’s Blog

I’ve been trying to get this review up since I finished Blood several months ago. The book covered so much and has so many layered parts to it, I will never do justice to the experience. I would love to hear from other readers since there may be something you found in the reading that I have been unable to express.

As I read this on my kindle, I threw up passages from the book almost every day. I love books that reference other books; they work like an introduction to new worlds. Blood not only referenced titles that were relevant to me, it also covered some familiar topics: creative process, freedom, writing, philosophy and classic erotic literature.

Here are a few of my favorite lines:

It’s hot in the laundromat. Hot and moist as the inside of a woman’s mouth.

It is a forbidden book. It is a handbook of sin, a worm in the heart of decency. Irresistible.

I learned that a man’s mettle is measured by his grace when he loses. I found that I wasn’t the man I wanted to be because all too often, I gave into my addictions of self pity, self hate, self loathing, self gratification.

The next couple of exchanges cracked me up. Here they are in the prison library, one of my favorite settings in the book. I especially appreciated being reminded of the power and possibility represented on one forgotten library shelf…

This Faulkner guy is weird, Mitch. He’s got a guy doing this babe with a corn cob. Can you believe it? Are you hungry?
Have you finished dusting the Fs?
You know there’s a whole lot of titles that start with F, I mean a whole lot, but you know Mitch, not one of them Fs got read? You know? Can you believe it? All the Fs is Virgins, Mitch.

Here’s another one:
What’s a declarative, Mitch? He asked.
It’s when you say something direct, I told him. Like you suck cock. That’s a declarative sentence.

What base element of life does not make an appearance in this book? We’ve got semen, tears, sweat, urine, and blood flowing through almost every scene.

I especially treasure books that refer to other books; they remind me that I am first a reader, held in thrall to an artist god. Often we have rituals as we read; Hank Mitchell’s reminded me that I am not alone in my appreciation of words, literature, and the all-powerful Author. Blood reminded me how vital books can be for us during the darkest times of our lives.

Hank writes on toilet paper, graduates to notebook paper, then a typewriter and finally works on a computer. This represented for me the growth of an artist in a most novel and vivid way.

Reading Blood was an experience like I have not had with any other book, it was a reaction, it was a journey, it was a nightmare, though its opening pages read like a dream. It is harsh, it is vivid, ugly, erotic and brutal. Though the book is set in a prison, all the elements of a rich life are represented here: justice, literature, salvation, art, loss, hatred, guilt, innocence and love.

One aspect of the book that I continue to struggle with were the things humans so casually do to each other. One part of me cheered for finally finding depictions of gay sex that aren’t self-conscious. Another cringed at the psychology behind giving yourself to another for reasons that are far different from those portrayed in Disney movies and jewelry commercials.  The way some of the relationships evolved disturbed me and made me examine why. To be brave we often have to face things that make us uncomfortable and as a writer I especially admire others who not only go to these, but stay and invite the rest of us to have a look around.

Blood is a book I will read again and still talk about.

I talk to my friends and other writers about going as far as you can to see what you are capable of, and in that discovering what can be revealed.  Blood is an excellent example of going all the way.

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Press Release–Gabriela and The Widow

Posted on October 7, 2012 by jack

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

 Coffeetown Announces the January Release of Gabriela and The Widow, a Story of Memory, Immortality and Redemption

Contact: Catherine Treadgold

Publisher Coffeetown Press

PO Box 70515

Seattle, WA 98127

206-414-7673

Catherine@coffeetownpress.Com

CoffeetownPress.com

 Seattle, WA.—On January 15, 2013, Coffeetown Press will release Gabriela and The Widow ($14.95, 280 pp, 6×9 Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-60381-147-7), a work of literary fiction by Jack Remick. Gabriela and The Widow tells the story of a dying aristocrat and the Mixteca caregiver who helps her assemble the jumbled pieces of her past, a process that gives them both love, closure, and the courage to move on.

Remick’s books have received impressive critical praise. A sampling:

Writes Jodi Lea Stewart, author of Summer of the Ancient, “Raw, exquisite writing talent splashed onto the page with such audacity and nerve that it gives you a heartache that burns a hole right through your spirit … that’s what I experienced reading Jack Remick’s Valley Boy.”

“If American literature produces one On the Road per century,” says poet and writer Priscilla Long, “then The Deification is it for the twenty-first. This road trip saga of would-be poet Eddie Iturbi from Sanger to San Francisco, from innocence to art, is fast, hot, thick, mythic, erudite, erotic, and intense.”

Of Remick’s novel Blood, the San Francisco Book Review writes, “The narrative is rhythmic, almost hypnotic, with a cadence like a relentless drum beat or at times a turbulent raging river. All of this combines to result in one of the best books I’ve ever read.”

The Widow (La Viuda) is ninety-two years old. She lives in a house filled with photos and coins, jewels and a sable coat. Aware that her memory is failing but burning with desire to record the story of her life on paper, she hires Gabriela, a nineteen-year-old Mixteca from Mexico. Gabriela is one of the few survivors of a massacre and treacherous journey to El Norte.

 Gabriela and the Widow is a story of chaos, revenge, and change: death and love, love and sex, and sex and death. Gabriela seeks revenge for the destruction of her village. The Widow craves balance for the betrayals in her life. In the end, the Widow gives Gabriela the secret of immortality.

 Remick says, “With Gabriela and The Widow I set out to write a novel about two women. One an immigrant, Gabriela, on a journey to the North, the other a dying old woman, a Widow who lives in the desert. I was drawn to the subject of the collision of cultures that is ripping America apart right now, but I also wished to examine how women relate without men. The men in Gabriela and The Widow are marginal—they are punishing, they are brutal, they are cheats and liars—but this is not a misanthropic book. It is the story of how The Widow makes Gabriela in her own image and sets her free from her bloody past. It is a book about mothers and daughters, it is a novel about women for women, but it is also a mythic recasting of the story of women before men.”

 Jack Remick is a poet, short story writer, and novelist. In 2012 Coffeetown Press published the first two volumes of Jack’s California Quartet series, The Deification and Valley Boy. The final two volumes will be released in 2013: The Book of Changes and Trio of Lost Souls. Blood, A Novel was published by Camel Press, an imprint of Coffeetown Press, in 2011. You can find Jack online at Blood.camelpress.com.

 Gabriela and The Widow is currently available for pre-order on Amazon.com. After January 15, 2013, it will also be available in multiple eBook and 6×9 trade paperback editions on BN.com, the European Amazons and Amazon Japan. Wholesale orders can be placed through info@coffeetownpress.com, Baker & Taylor or Ingram. Libraries can also purchase books through Follett Library Resources or Midwest Library Service.

 

 

ABOUT Coffeetown Press—Based in Seattle, Washington, Coffeetown Press has been publishing the finest fiction and nonfiction since 2005.

 

–END–

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The Jack Straw 50th–A place, an instrument, and time

Posted on July 1, 2012 by jack

The Jack Straw 50th
Seattle, June 15th, 2012
7:00 AM

A man turns a clarinet into a horn, a flute, a piccolo. He plays a Suite for Parts of the Clarinet.
It is unlike anything I’ve heard before. I ask him if he invented this. “No,” he says.
He takes no credit for expanding a marching band instrument into an orchestra.
For his performance, an audience of two.
A jazz pianist improvises. He plays his own music. He is both in and out of reality, head bowed, hands working, no matter that there’s an audience of three.

Matt Briggs reads three short stories—Expose No Button, A Happy Novel, The Score. They are exemplary stories in an exemplary style for a new world. No fear, no hesitation, the art boils out into the Twenty-first Century. The audience? Three plus the recording technician.

A lutenist sits on a chair playing Elizabethan tunes to an audience of four. The music, coming down from centuries links the Jack Straw Foundation to all art, all myth, all creation.

This is one hour in the twenty-four hour celebration of the Jack Straw Foundation’s Fiftieth Anniversary.

It is a quiet celebration—artists performing for fifteen minutes for a few listeners at seven o’clock in the morning in June 15th, 2012. But the artists, like all artists, give it all they’ve got—one listener, a roomful, a hundred thousand– it doesn’t matter. The artists lost in the work, the work is what matters, nothing matters but the high moment of recreation when the artists ride once again the mythic wave that gave them voice the first time.

This is a quiet celebration that teaches me that art needs an audience. Sure. Even two listeners are an audience. But it teaches me this more important lesson—Art needs only a place, an instrument, and time. Time. And Jack Straw has given all of these artists just want they need.

This celebration of the arts through fifty years and hundreds of novelists, musicians, poets tells us so much about the art and the craft and the role and, above all, the dedication of artist to the art.

For me, it was a unique moment. I like unique moments.

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Gabriela and The Widow–Coming on January 15, 2013 from Coffeetown Press

Posted on June 13, 2012 by jack

Image by permission of Kevin Coyne © 2012
Cover design by M. Anne Sweet and Sabrina Sun

From the Opening: © 2012 by Jack Remick
The year the war ended, Gabriela led her sick Mother out of Tepeñixtlahuaca. The bones of the villagers still had meat on them then and the hearths still had fire in them but the retreating soldiers had chased away the skinny dogs and burned the houses. In the jungle the murdered bodies of young women lay rotting. The young men had become soldiers and had, in their own time, committed atrocities.

And from the Ending:
And when Nando was gone and the village was quiet, the skinny dogs waddled up out of the gash in the earth and their jaws were red with blood and tangles of meat and skin clung to their teeth and they squatted before Gabriela licking their paws and, had they been human, she would have seen happiness in their eyes.

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Valley Boy has been published and I am Happy.

Posted on May 1, 2012 by jack

Valley Boy, Part of the Okie Chronicle– A Novel by Jack Remick

Valley Boy ($13.95, 254 pp, 6×9 Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-60381-145-3), by Jack Remick, covers a year in the life of a third-generation Okie teenager who is struggling with the stigma of his heritage.

** CLICK THE COVER IMAGE TO ORDER **

**ALSO AVAILABLE IN KINDLE **

“Valley Boy is the story of every kid who wandered out of the Valley into Baghdad by the Bay with dreams, imagination, curiosity and a mind that admitted stuff besides cars and girls. I’m tempted to say this is Remick’s best work …. The story is witty, tense and true. The protagonist is Ricky, but this is Linard’s story too—which makes this novel a more fulfilling coming of age journey than that of the self-absorbed, self-righteous icon of the Eastern Experience—Holden Caulfield …. Remick might be accused of writing a happy ending but I, for one, am happy to see an ol’ Okie boy find his place in the shade and out of those god damned vineyards and peach orchards. Good for Ricky. Good for Remick. It takes guts to write a novel such as this.”

—Frank Araujo, Anthropologist, Linguist, and Author of The Q Quest, A Perfect Orange, Nekane, The Lamiña and the Bear

“Valley Boy is a teeming amalgam of allegory, pathos, and stark language, all wrapped in a blend of dark humor and strangely relatable characters. What is Valley Boy about? Turkey debeaker Ricky Edwards heads to college, falls in love with a rock guitarist, and faces coming of age challenges—such as learning how to order coffee and the importance of following The Rules—revealed in a storyline reminiscent of an Allen Ginsberg poem. Remick writes with a fresh voice in prose as raw as the open wounds his subjects are apt to suffer. An unrelenting literary experiment that is also a terrific read. Best enjoyed with a caffe latte … or maybe a macchiato?”

—Cole Alpaugh, author of The Bear in a Muddy Tutu and The Turtle Girl from East Pukapuka

“A lost Valley Boy is dying to belong so he takes a job debeaking turkeys—hot, sweaty, mindless work that still demands precision—to make the money to buy a hot car—the pricey ticket required for acceptance into the Lifters (all male hot rod club), but forces beyond his control—blind teenage lust, blue collar legacy, his inherited talent for the piano, love from an older woman, his jaundiced view of the church, and an exorbitant price for the blue Mercury Cougar—these forces pull the Valley Boy to the brink of his big decisions: Does he stay in the Valley? Does he marry the girl next door? Valley Boy is Remick at full power. Valley Boy is a non-stop read.”

—Robert J. Ray, author of Murdock Cracks Ice, and The Weekend Novelist Series.

Ricky Edwards lives, works, and plays in Centerville, a small California town in the middle of the Valley. Ricky has a gift for music but he’d rather fight, drink beer, chase girls, and debeak turkeys. He debeaks turkeys because he wants a Lifters Car Club jacket with red lettering on the back. He fights because his long time pal, Linard Polk, teaches him about violence, fast cars, and guns—which drives Teresa, Ricky’s hyper-religious mother, nuts. She wants Ricky to escape the legacy of his daddy, an Okie skirt chaser who abandoned the family for a honky-tonk preacher’s daughter gone bad. If Ricky can just get out of Centerville, maybe he can make his mark.

Says Remick: “When you grow up in the Central Valley you meet people who never stray much beyond their home town unless it’s to go next door to a football game. If you’re not the right caste, you learn to work with your hands and you work hard. You wonder if you can ever get out. I wrote Valley Boy in part to remind readers about the Diaspora, the Westward migration, that started in the Dust Bowl. Most people think the Migration ended with World War II, but it didn’t. In Valley Boy, the main characters are third-generation Okies who didn’t make it to the Pacific, got stuck in the dust, and were left behind in the orchards and vineyards doing the gut-busting labor that turns young boys into old men way too soon. I wanted to write about those Okie boys, like Ricky and Linard, who work and live with the bad taste of lost dreams in their mouths.

Jack Remick is a poet, short story writer, and novelist. Valley Boy is Book Two of a series, The California Quartet. More volumes will be released by Coffeetown Press in 2012: The Book of Changes and Trio of Lost Souls. The first book of the series, The Deification, was released in December of 2011. Blood, A Novel was published by Camel Press in 2011. Also coming from Coffeetown in 2012: Gabriela and the Widow. Click here to find Jack online.

Valley Boy is available in Kindle and 5×8 trade paperback editions on Amazon.com, the European Amazons and Amazon Japan. Wholesale orders can be placed through info@coffeetownpress.com or Ingram. Libraries can also purchase books through Follett Library Resources and Midwest Library Service.

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Mark Stone Reviews Blood

Posted on January 28, 2012 by jack

(Mark posted this review on Goodreads. I am reposting. Thanks Mark)

01/26                     Mark Stone            gave 5 stars to:        Blood by Jack Remick

I don’t read a lot of thrillers, but when I do it is usually James Patterson, John Sanford, or Joseph Garber, all masters of the craft. However, being one of the select who now belong to the Camel Press family, I had occasion to read a book called Blood, by Jack Remick.
Much to my chagrin, I have come to realize that although I LOVE this book, I had not bothered to post a review! Boy, do I feel like a prize idiot, considering that I write reviews on this very blog and on Slacker Heroes. I can only apologize to the talented Jack Remick for not writing one earlier.

Some would call Hank Mitchell a sociopathic killer, some would call him an unfeeling automaton who kills merely for money. Some might say that he is a damaged human being seeking an elusive something to complete his personal voyage of discovery. I happen to think that all these descriptions apply. As a protagonist, Mitchell is certainly not one you root for day one, but with surgical precision, deft wordsmithing, and blistering heat, Remick creates in Mitchell a bizarre anti-hero you can’t help but feel connected to.

The story bursts forth with uncompromising passion and honesty to wrap the reader in the blanket of Mitchell’s strange little world. Now, I am not one to empathize with efficient, cold-blooded killers. Not my cup of tea, but there are exceptions to every rule and this one is mine. At the heart of this story it is sad and poignant, wild and paranoid and even downright surreal, but no matter how odd, how bizarre, it grips the reader with furious tension.
I am not going to tell you more about the book than I already have. I will leave the joy of discovery for you. What I will say is be prepared for a gamut of emotions as you read. There are very few books that, when I finish, I say ‘wow’.
Wow!

Mark Stone’s paranormal sleuth, Kal Hakala, appears in:

Things to do in Denver when You’re Undead

What Happens in Vegas, Dies in Vegas
Mark’s novels are available from Camel Press and Amazon.

 

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