News, Other Stuff

Curbside sr. editor Jacob S. Knabb (also known as Harold Ray) was on Vocalo 89.5 FM earlier this week on the Realk Talk show talking about what we do, what we want to do, our parties, our forthcoming book May We Shed These Human Bodies, and more.  Check out the clip here.

Tweet

jacob knabb.mp3 on Vocalo.org 89.5

In Curbside Sounds we feature authors we dig reading their work or telling a story while sitting on a curb or their favorite bench, at a bar, at a recording studio, and sometimes at home.  For this installment we've got Chicago author Joe Meno reading an excerpt from his new novel Office Girl.  Recorded at the iconic music club The Empty Bottle as part of Curbside Splendor Publishing's A Night of Words & Music on Thursday July 26, 2012.

Joe Meno is a fiction writer and playwright who lives in Chicago. A winner of the Nelson Algren Literary Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Great Lakes Book Award, and a finalist for the Story Prize, he is the author of five novels, The Great Perhaps, The Boy Detective Fails, Hairstyles of the Damned, How the Hula Girl Sings, Tender as Hellfire, and his most recent Office Girl.  Find him here http://www.joemeno.com/

Tweet

Joe Meno Reads at the Empty Bottle by Curbside Splendor

This is an eight part series by Portland author Aaron Gilbreath consisting of his interviews with members of Portland's homeless population.  Stay tuned for part II next week.

Aaron Gilbreath is a burrito-obsessed essayist, journalist, and housesitter. He resides in Portland and his work can be found all over the place.  Click here to learn more about him. 

Tweet

Introduction

Like all interesting people and places, Portland, Oregon is a multifaceted character. There is Portland the socially progressive utopia of artists, food carts and environmentally conscious urbanism. And there is the Portland of pretention, heroin addiction, racial separation and rampant homelessness. The city occupies a county that has over 15,000 homeless people. That figure includes not only people who sleep on the street and in shelters, but those who sleep on friends’ couches and in cars and in transitional housing. In 2009, Oregon ranked first in the nation for homelessness per capita.

Those of us who have lived here long enough to have watched the city change from a sleepy little low-rent secret to a globally hyped mecca of gastronomy and marketable eccentricity know that no matter how empathetic your constitution, the sheer scale of homelessness here means that you can easily became immune to the presence of it. Two soiled feet sticking out from under a blanket, a body curled in a doorway atop cardboard slabs – to Portlanders, these sights can become as unexceptional as a sign at a coffee shop advertising gluten-free muffins. I don’t like growing accustomed to human suffering. Empathy should never grow callouses. Yet overly accustomed is what I’d become. Here I was, surrounded by the homeless, yet I knew close to nothing about them or their lives. So I spent the summer of 2011 speaking to them on the street.

Tweet

*Photo by Stephanie Bassos, Chicago-based photographer.

Franki Elliot is a 20-something author from Chicago and blogs for us every Monday.  Curbside published her first book Piano Rats (October 2011). We are publishing her second book in late spring 2013.  For more Franki typewriter stories visit http://frankielliottypewriter.tumblr.com/

You are so extraordinary
I think you touch the roof
of heaven, and I am not
afraid to taste what dropping
to the ground from the tree
of life spells doom. I love
unconditionally as a god; I'm
encompassed by a palm and
watched by binary stars.

Tweet

Charles Bane Jr. is an American Poet.  This is from a series of letters Charles has written to Donald Hall, former Poet Laureate of the U.S.  Curbside Splendor published his first book The Chapbook (July 2011) and will publish his second book New New Poems / Nuevos Poemas (Fall 2012) via Concepcion Books, a new Curbside imprint, with the work presented in both English and Spanish.  New Poems / Nuevos Poemas is now available for pre-order here.