Shya Scanlon

As the mid-December release date of my proem collection In This Alone Impulse draws near, I’ve been “moved” to fiddle with iMovie. The result has so far been two ITAI poems performed (in a manner of speaking), among other weird offshoots. Please take a look at the video for A bargain, and Burn or turn or.

If you dig ‘em, please consider subscribing to my YouTube channel, so you’ll receive notification when I post more from the collection. Thank you for your fancy time.

Author John Gorman has interviewed me for his blog, Paper Cut.

An essay I wrote about the history and future of serialization was serialized at The Faster Times, and then again at Flatmancrooked.

UPDATE: the Opium9 microsite is live, and a thing to behold.

My relationship with Opium Magazine has had many stages over the years. I first met Todd Zuniga by inviting him down to Seattle (he was living in Vancouver at the time) to read at the Monkeybicycle reading series I was hosting. Since then, I’ve published poetry and fiction in several issues, participated in the Literary Death Match (I’ve lost twice!), and had one of their recurring contests (7 Line Story Contest) named after my prose cycle In This Alone Impulse.

Now we’re stepping it up a notch. For Opium’s 9th issue, I’ve edited a fat section of Fan Fiction, which includes many of the most exciting writers I know: Ryan Boudinot, Ben Greenman, B.K. Evenson, Sean Carman, Nick Bredie, Matt Briggs, E. Loic Leuschner, Blake Butler, Matthew Simmons and Lindsay Mound. The rest of the issue promises, as always, an assemblage of fantastic cartoons and fiction, as well as the finalists of the Andrew Sean Greer-judged Bookmark Contest.

It’s available for pre-order, so you know what to do.

The Opium Magazine empire has always kept a door open to me, and I keep finding myself inside. Who knows what will come next? My face on the cover? Let’s hope not.

*UPDATE* In This Alone Impulse is now listed in Small Press Distribution’s online catalog. It will be available for purchase in December, and will be included in their next print catalogue as well (special thanks to Clay Banes, who rushed to fit it in at the last moment).

My dear friend and lifelong designer Matty Harper has created a beautiful cover for my first collection of poetry, In This Alone Impulse, due out from Noemi Press in December. We spoke about the book quite a bit, and his intuition and design acumen led him to what I think is an arresting image, both playful and deranged.

In This Alone Impulse

Links to work from this collection can be found on my Work page.

I’ve been contributing for a few months to The Nervous Breakdown–a Web site featuring the non-fiction of almost 200 authors from around the world–and last week, the site’s fun-loving founder, Brad Listi, told me that they were in the process of completely redesigning the site to include sections for fiction, poetry, arts & culture, reviews and more. Then he asked me if I’d like to be one of the fiction editors.

I had to think about this. If you didn’t know, I was one of the first editors of Monkeybicycle, working with Steven Seighman to create the first three issues, run the weekly-updated Web site, and host a monthly reading series that seriously kicked ass. It was great fun, and very rewarding. But it was a lot of work. Am I ready for that again? Well, to make a long story short, I decided that I was. Am. So I accepted.

In addition to showcasing some excellent work by writers I and the other editors are excited about, the fiction section will feature “self-interviews,” in which writers will have a chance to ask themselves all the tough or silly questions they don’t usually get to answer–or just haven’t been able to answer fully. The launch won’t happen for another month or two, but in the meantime, I’m on the hunt for writers to feature. I’ve written up a call-for-authors, and have been sending it around to agents. But I’ll also be approaching writers themselves. Here’s what I’ve been sending around: CALL FOR AUTHORS.

I’m super stoked to be part of The Nervous Breakdown, especially at this auspicious moment in its development.

I’ve been waiting a long time to write this post, and now that it’s upon me, I can’t seem to find any more interesting way to express it than by getting right to the point: Flatmancrooked will be publishing Forecast in 2010.

FMC is a new press. It is a small press. And it is a very ambitious press. They have big ideas about what 21st century publishing has the potential to become, and I’m both excited and humbled that they’ve asked me to be a part of their visionary project.

This is the first of what will doubtless be a series of FMC-related posts, as we embark upon the great journey of turning a novel into a book.

(For those of you who’ve been following along with the serialization, think of it as a sneak peak of the novel in draft form: the novel is undergoing some significant changes during revision. Feel free to send me any comments you have on the serialized version–who knows? They could find their way into the print version.)

Not included in the serialized version of the book, this prologue introduces the novel’s narrator, and foreshadows some of the book’s more outlandish preoccupations.

Forecast Prologue

Author and editor Ravi Mangla has created a blog called Recommended Reading, in which he asks a great assortment of writers about their reading habits, then asks them to put together a reading list after some theme of their choosing. My interview went up today: click here to read it. Also, I encourage you to read through the blog’s archive.

Not mine. Someone’s, though, surely. It’s a website I’ve begun to contribute to: a place for nonfiction. There is a great variety of talented folks posting at least one update a month (a condition of membership requested by the founder of the site, author Brad Listi), and I’ve been quite pleased with the result: a view into the minds of writers all over the globe.

My second update was posted on the eve of my 34th birthday, and is a smattering of thoughts and observations culled from day-to-day life between Providence, RI, Tuscon, AZ, and NYC. Take a look.