Posted inAmbulations

At the Lindemann ‘Skills in Pills’ Exhibit in Dresden

My wife and I snuck away to Germany early in July to visit with family and old friends, and during our stay, we took a side trip to the former east to spend a few days in the city of Dresden. It's a fantastic city, brimming with festive nightlife partying in the streets of the "neustadt" and overwhelming with architectural beauty and the high life of the "oldstadt." In the midst of it all, I had an unplanned encounter with Till Lindemann. Till is not only the lead singer of the uber-metal group Rammstein, but also the author of On…
July 20, 2015Posted inAmbulations
Posted inAmbulations

Photos from World Horror Con 2015

I am so glad that I attended the 25th World Horror Convention & 2015 Bram Stoker Awards Banquet in Atlanta, GA, this past weekend. I think I was laughing the whole time, giddy with the good times and gore. It was great to reunite with so many old friends (I actually attended the very first WHC, 25 years ago!), and as usual, made several new buddies, too. There were something like sixteen Seton Hill MFA program students, alums or faculty colleagues in attendance, a barrel of Raw Dog Screaming Press associates, and hundreds of gibbering weirdos, which meant I always…
May 12, 2015Posted inAmbulations
Posted inAmbulations

FLASH CONTEST: It’s #Haikuween Night on Twitter

[Note: this contest has officially ended. See results at the bottom of this post.] Horror poet Stephanie Wytovich (author of Hysteria and Mourning Jewelry) and I will be live-tweeting horror haiku intermittently on twitter.com throughout Halloween night, from 7pm-11pm eastern. Anyone who retweets one of our poems tagged with #Haikuween (or who posts their own bloody #Haikuween tagged as such) will be entered into a random draw to win the infamous "Poedown" limited lettered CD (in a double-live case, coupled with the Arnzensongs CD). This is a very rare treasure, as only selected backers of the Fridge of the Damned…
October 31, 2014Posted inAmbulations
Posted inAmbulations

Scenes from the Bizarro Halloween Party / Grave Markings Launch

Last night, Raw Dog Screaming Press threw a great Bizarro Halloween night and launch party for Grave Markings 20th Anniversary Edition at the Terrault Contemporary gallery in Baltimore, MD. As you'll see in the photos below, advanced copies of the novel were available, and the night featured a series of fiction readings, emceed by bizarro author John Edward Lawson. The tattoo artist responsible for the great tat on the cover of the book, Ethan Fuhrer, was on hand, along with Nathan Rosen, designer of the covers for GM and Play Dead. The highlight of the night was hearing creepy stories…
October 26, 2014Posted inAmbulations
Posted inAmbulations

AWP14 Seattle

Last weekend, I attended the 2014 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference (aka AWP14) at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle. The AWP website boasts that with over 12,000 attendees and 650 exhibits it is "now the largest literary conference in North America" -- and it certainly was the largest I've been to in my life, with a shopping-mall sized number of tables (featuring colleges, writing programs, presses and publishers) at the bookfair and plenty of superhuman writers as guests (Sherman Alexie and Ursula LeGuin gave readings, for example). Seton Hill University had a table for our MFA…
March 8, 2014Posted inAmbulations