christopher cocca

6s Vol 2 will not be available for purchase today.  You can check out Rob McEvily’s post here.  I’m all for anything that builds up more anticpation.  As soon as the volume is ready, I’ll link to it.  Sounds like sometime next week, perhaps.

This is a great and helpful post.  One of the best parts:

For what it is worth to you, apart from pay scale, you take 20 years of wondering if your work reaches people and you turn it into two years of having people tell you to your face whether it reached them or not. Very talented people, in some cases, geniuses. Thus the ambivalence towards these programs, on the part of many writers. You may think you want to know but then when you do, it’s rough sometimes. But, sometimes not. As my sister says, you just don’t know until you know.

The ability to come and see…that’s priceless.

Scenario:  I see a headline begining with the words “Galactic Cosmic Rays…”

Yes, yes I do jump right to “Imbue Astronauts With Fantastic Powers!”  and you should, too.

Now I know that the Fantastic Four weren’t actually astronauts.  They were private scientists (and a kid and a hot shot pilot heavy).  But still.

Unfortunately, it’s just a post about the crummy old hole in the ozone layer.

Some of you know that I applied to the Master’s of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at The New School earlier this year. I’m pleased to report that I’ve been accepted.   Information about the program is here.   My concentration will be in fiction.

I visited The New School for an informational session in December and knew immediately that this was the program I wanted to be in.  I’m very, very excited.   A special thanks to Paul Stern and Raquel Pidal.  You are both rock stars.

Classes meet at night, which means that students with day-time commitments (a business and a family in my case) can still engage fully in the program.  I’m not far, in the scheme of things, from the city, and I’ll use commuter lines (thank you, Carl R. Beiber) two nights a week.

The course of study breaks down like this:

The program is designed to be completed in four semesters. During each of their first three terms, students enroll in one writing workshop (4 credits) in their area of concentration and one literature seminar (4 credits) and must participate in the Writer’s Life Colloquium (1 credit). During their final term of residence, students continue to participate in the Writer’s Life Colloquium but no longer enroll in writing workshops or literature seminars. Instead, they work closely with one or more New School writer-teacher advisors in independent study leading to the creation of a Writing Thesis (4 credits) and a Literature Project (4 credits), both within their area of concentration.

I’d love to hear from other New School-bound writers who find this post.

Six Sentences Vol. 2 hits the streets in 6 days.   There’s an intro by Neil LaBute and a special appearence by Rick Moody.  And then there are the fabulous six-sentence stories by authors from around the world.  I’m excited to be included.

Our friend Rob, 6s founder and editior, has a new promotional video below:

Lent, from the German Lenz,
is just spring.
The Dutch have lente,
but, after their teachers,
our theologians capitalize.

These words mean long
like the days,
and Easter,
a proper noun,
is disputed.

Maundy is from Latin,
Middle English,
Old French.
It is commandment:
love ye as I have.

Gethsemane is oil press
in Christ’s native tongue
and Calvary comes somehow from
skull,
in Aramaic,
Golgotha.
You are perhaps Adam’s bed,
gaudy shrine.

But why seek ye the living
in dead boneyard must?
Why shroud in purple,
why cower in black?
Woman, why are you crying?
Beloved, why should you weep?
There is no pomace in
God’s bladder press.

We have not killed again
that seed
Nor do we resurrect him,
Not at sunrise in accordance with
lost circles of the moon,
not in sweet wine or with flat bread
or  leaven.

And so then let us stop pretending
that we follow with him,
that we know the cold stone
Saturday
and have not seen its end.
There is no holy pantomime,
no birth-right rhythm drama;
there is only living.

About a year ago, I wrote a post about emerging writers and the “legitimacy gap.”   I said things like:

The indie-artistic boom owes everything to the changing ways people are using the internet; as technology evolves so too does the place of online production, distribution and consumption in our lives. Even so, this jump to legitimacy isn’t an option for most fiction writers. The self-publishing stigma remains a strong one and there are reasons for this. While self-publishing a novel or a short-story collection is almost universally a bad idea, self-publishing literature custom made for the internet medium (say, flash fiction) might be a natural kind of thing for emerging writers to consider. Until reading becomes as visceral for people as listening to digital music (never) there will be no overnight literary sensations, but there many be unique indie ways for writers and artists to connect, expand their social networks (online and elsewhere) and share their work in broader circles. The key, though, is that you have to be willing to share. And you have to be satisfied knowing that some fantastic piece of writing that no one else wants may work better as an open source template for other artists to use and promote.

It was at this point that I decided to license all the written content on this site in the Creative Commons.  I haven’t had many (or really any) takers on the original idea, but I have found editors and venues that share the ethos and promote the kind of collaborative culture I meant to describe. 

About 3 months ago, I wrote “A Blogging Dialectic For Emerging Writers”  from a slightly different perspective, having spent the intervening 9 months blogging more seriously and more often.  In some ways, I have writer’s block to thank for the increased output:  having finished the umpteenth draft of my first novel, I needed to be away from it and to express myself differently.  Directly.  Not through characters that I know like family or narration I can recite in my sleep.   I’ve also written more creative (well, hell, I’ll even call it literary) content specifically for web outlets in this period and I’ve embraced the idea that giving readers something worth reading on your own site is the best way for writers to make connections.  So sometimes I send things out, but more often, lately, I publish them here. 

 Interestingly, in the last few months, two pieces previously published at microfiction weblit sites (Six Sentences and Tuesday Shorts) have been accepted for inclusion in forthcoming print volumes.  A third piece is currently a finalist for inclusion in the next edition of a New York Times bestselling collection of 6-word memoirs.  

Writing for and in the Creative Commons has made these things possible.  None of the writers at Six Sentences or Tuesdays Shorts (or the host of other great, non-paying markets) are paid for our work, but we believe in supporting creative communities, promoting good editors and venues, and having our work seen.  The editors of these sites believe in the writers they publish and promote.  These are community efforts.  Maybe one day they’ll turn a profit, but that’s not the point.  They are, right now, working as they were meant to.   If you’re willing to share, there are people willing to share with you.  Yes, I encourage self-publishing some of your best or hardest-to-market work on your own site, but I only came to that after getting to know editors and journals and what might fit where, after being rejected hundreds of times, getting feedback, getting published, blogging more regularly, etc.  Now, the places I do submit to are usually ones I’m inspired to write specifically for.  Other stuff goes here, and this is, I think, not a bad way of sharing.  

“I love my neighbor as I love myself — which is to say, minimally, if at all, and in between fits of out-and-out loathing. But this is not quite the same thing as Christian charity, and one doesn’t skip into heaven through a loophole. If the spirit should finally move me, and I answer the call to care for my fellow man unconditionally, the biggest challenge will be extending my newfound caritas to the religious zealots, for it is the zealots… whom I despise above all. Is it any wonder that from the Redeemer to Augustine, from Pascal to W. H. Auden, it has been the doubters, more than the believers, who have kept up religion’s good name? A skeptic in this tradition, Darcey Steinke is also, in her own way, a skeptic about the virtues of the contemporary memoir, now a mostly secular genre in which every human unhappiness is trendily medicalized or assigned its origin in a topical childhood trauma. In her memoir, “Easter Everywhere,” Steinke has dared to ask, What if my abiding sense of misery isn’t due to abuse or balky neurotransmission, but to the absence of God in my life, to an unfulfilled relationship with my own divinity, as vouchsafed to me by the Creator?”  – from Stephen Metcalf’s review of Darcey Steinke’s Easter Everywhere.

I just ordered Easter Everywhere from Amazon.  I’m looking forward to it.

Noel Gallagher once said that The Red Album shows the Beatles as the ultimate pop band, and The Blue Album shows them as the ultimate rock band.

I, however,  am starting to think that the Kinks have always been both.

Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t. Does Barack Obama have true contempt for special needs kids and the organizations that empower them? I don’t claim to know. I do know, though, that last night, a sitting President of the United States made fun of the Special Olympics (and by necessity, special needs participants) on national television.

And so now he has apologized. Fantastic. He was off the TelePrompTer on Leno, etc, etc, etc, but doesn’t it just kind of bother you that the President’s top-of-mind point of reference here is the special needs community? Does “I suck at X” really equate for him to having special needs? I don’t know, but it did last night without missing much of a beat. Even more jarring is the implicit worth statement it betrays:  at least on some level, Obama thinks it’s okay to make fun of (that is, laugh at) special needs children, and to compare his physical ineptitude at one mundane athletic task with true disability.  His comment, by its context within a bumbling attempt at the half-hearted guffaw yuk that is Leno’s style, seems also to suggest that there’s something implicitly funny about all of this in the first place.  Top-of-mind humor. What might that suggest about the philosophies behind, say, his abortion policies?   Just thought I’d throw that out there.