Interviews Dave Housley Interviews Dave Housley

To Meet People and Create Some Shit: Barrelhousing with Michael Tager

Michael Tager's Pop Culture Poetry: The Definitive Collection, out now from akinoga press, is a wonderful collection of contradictions: fun, accessible, smart poems that examine our cultural and personal connection with celebrity. Funny and sad, jokey but not a joke, these poems take subject matter like Justin Bieber, Patrick Swayze, and the Golden Girls just seriously enough. We sat down to talk with Michael about the book and making real art out of, as the Barrelhouse tagline goes, pop flotsam and cultural jetsam. 

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Dave Housley Dave Housley

Coyotes, Lizard People, and an Interview with Ryan Rivas, Oh My!, by Alex Gurtis

Writing flash is an act of extreme distillation. Every word counts. Every image and gesture is imbued with meaning. I think first and foremost practicing flash fiction helped me as an editor of other people, to be unsparing on the sentence level. And that carried over into my longer works, which as you point out is a relative term.

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Dave Housley Dave Housley

Popping in the VHS Tape: Tangible and Intangible Artifacts with Michael Wheaton, by Alex Gurtis

If you looked for a textbook definition of a good literary citizen, Michael Wheaton’s name would almost certainly come up. Wheaton is best known for his work as the publisher of Autofocus Books and as the producer for the podcast, The Lives of Writers. He is also a talented essayist, whose debut book, Home Movies, came out in February from BUNNY. Curious about the intersection of writer and publishing, we corresponded over email.

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Dave Housley Dave Housley

Issue 24 Preview: Domino, by David LeGault

I like that a game is not a matter of rules, but of possibility: each board or card or piece gives possibility to beautifully imagined worlds and challenges. I like the ways that games encourage us to work in collaborative metaphors, to create beautiful conflicts to overcome.

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Dave Housley Dave Housley

Issue 24 Preview: The Body Made Curious, by Megan Walsh

At night, flesh. Her tits sliding into her armpits, her stomach pushing against the elastic of her panties. The elbow with the dry patch that’s cracking, the crick in her neck. All of her sinking, spilling, oozing into the mattress, sloppy and sweating with a pillow between her knees, an itch on her ribcage she can’t ignore. Her stomach growling, her heart thumping. Meat.

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Dave Housley Dave Housley

The Swayze Question

Since it’s founding in 2004, Barrelhouse has ended every interview with the same question: what is your favorite Patrick Swayze movie? We’ve asked The Swayze Question, quite literally, to anybody who would talk to us, everyone from Emmylou Harris to Ian MacKaye to Malcolm Gladwell to the Hold Steady.

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Dave Housley Dave Housley

All Things Edible, Random, and Odd: Barrelhousing with Sheila Squillante

Sheila Squillante’s essay collection, All Things Edible, Random, and Odd, forthcoming from Clash Books, is equal parts memoir, celebration of her late father and the love of food that he passed on to his daughter, and exploration of the way these things continue influence her family’s life. We sat down around the virtual dinner table to talk about the book, the difference between writing memoir and essays, poetry and painting, and uncoolness, the Eighties, and of course Patrick Swayze.

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