Our interview with Bud Smith, author of Tollbooth and F 250.
"Every day is a obstacle course of things trying to get in the way. I just try to stay on my toes and look for some spare minutes that I can feed to the art monster that lives in my brain."
An interview with Douglas Soesbe, screenwriter and novelist, and writer of the film Boulevard, starring Robin Williams in his final screen role.
"You need to condense life, bring it to its essential moment ..."
An interview with Lisa Mangini, writer and founding editor of Paper Nautilus.
"I was preparing to move, and found a decorative box with all my concert ticket stubs inside. I started looking through them, and each one immediately drew me right back to the evening of the concert itself. I started to recall not the music or the quality of the show itself, but rather the people I watched the show with, what I was wearing, the drive to the venue, the weather, what was going on in my life. I realized that so little about going to a concert is actually about the performance, and wanted to more deeply explore the whole ritual of seeing live music."
"I want to write words to rattle in peoples’ heads and cut their hearts so deeply that once they’ve finished sounding them out, these people feel like they’ve been kicked in the gut and feel like it was the most beautiful beating they’ve ever received. I want my longer stories to be a means of escape; I want people to disappear for hours and when they finally emerge they look around and wonder where the hell they are."
"I love the American West, and I love reading and writing about the West. If I occasionally take issue with the “Western fiction” label, it’s simply because I think it can sometimes be used to separate so-called “regional” literature from literary fiction as a whole."
Erin Parker is a name that should be familiar to readers of Drunk Monkeys. Her story, “Gone Like the Moon”, was the first story published in 2014, and nominated for The Best of the Net. Her work, a mixture of the personal and the surreal, has been featured in numerous publications and anthology, most notably as a regular part of the Uno Kudo series.
"The room was so quiet, and the love coming at me from everyone listening to me read was palpable. I could feel it coming at me in waves, it was beautiful. Reading it seemed to go on forever, and I remember trying to read slower and slower because I didn’t want the moment to be over! When I was done, I felt like the story was actually gone from inside of me, the events of the story were finally, finally done after so many years."
With the launch of Napster in 1999 the proverbial Pandora’s Box of the digital age was more than opened, it was pillaged and burnt to the ground. No longer would the record companies and movie studios that we had relied on to provide for our entertainment needs control the playing field. Napster drew criticism early on from many artists, such as Dr. Dre and Metallica because their music was being freely distributed without the collection or payment of any royalties.
"What they need to do is hold ad networks responsible. These ad networks now have a financial stake in financing illegal activity. They made money off illegal and legal activity without any consequence. Imagine it like a pawn shop, thousands of years ago society figured out pawn shop people had to be responsible for what was in their pawn shop. If it was stolen or not and if society didn’t do that anything about it someone could steal your chariot or your big vase and take it to the pawn shop. They could make money and the pawn shop guy could make money, and the person that owned the chariot or owned the big vase is out. After a while the system is going to wear out because no one is going to put any energy into something if it’s going to be stolen."
Canadian artist/writer Rolli has made a splash in the worlds of cartooning and literature with his singular comedic sensibility. His cartoons have been featured in Reader’s Digest and The Harvard Review. He has released collections of short fiction, including the critically acclaimedGod’s Autobio, and the recent I Am Currently Working on a Novel.
