#indie lit

[rustbeltjessie]

Reckless Chants #27: to resist despair

I entered this issue of my zine into this year's Broken Pencil Zine Awards, in the perzine category, and I recently found out it didn't even get nominated, let alone win. I was venting about it on Facebook and said: "I should make a promo image for it that says something like this zine didn't win any awards, but previous issues got good reviews in "Maximum Rocknroll," and it's been compared to "Cometbus" several times." One of my friends said: "You should make something like that, it's a clever way of handling your disappointment with humor and style." So I did! I also made some other promo images, featuring collages and excerpts from the issue.

A text-heavy zine with some collages (+ a comic and a pull-out centerfold), Reckless Chants #27 includes pieces about growing up as a queer punk in a mid-sized Midwest city, favorite bands, old friends lost and found, Wisconsin and Chicago, disappointment and sadness, resisting despair, still believing in punk after all these years, and so much more. 52 pages, half-letter size. $5+$3 shipping (w/in the U.S.). Available for purchase via: ko-fi.com / rustbeltjessie paypal.me / rustbeltjessie Venmo: @ JessieLynnMcMains If you live outside the U.S. and would like to order a copy, or would like to pay some other way, please contact me at coeur.de.fantome @ gmail.com. Also, if you run a shop or distro and would like to sell this zine (or any other zines I have available), I offer bulk/wholesale prices—please contact me!

[therumpus]

"Go to Rome, toss a coin in the Trevi fountain, and wish for your reproductive rights."

Rumpus Original Column Funny Women: "Ways* to Get Reproductive Rights" by Susanna Goldfinger. Read the full comic here.

[ashtrayfloors]

I Was Around (Nobody Knows)

so you're in love with your best friend & you don't know how to tell her. take a walk down Polaris Avenue & you'll be transported to the sort of childhood you never quite knew, an adolescence half-fantasized that you sorta remember when dreaming of fireflies, soft serve cones, bike rides & skinned knees. that life you never had lives on this street—it's not that nothing bad ever happens here. there are bullies & math classes just like anywhere else, & sometimes you're grounded for life for wrecking your dad's prized lawn. sometimes the ice cream man vanishes or you find a garage band playing the most perfect tune & you never get to hear it again. but even when your heart is disintegrating the radio has the saddest song to soothe you & a bus driver who takes you past the sites of his own broken romance, & if you megadose on riboflavin you can turn back time. even if it's hot & you're so homesick it's got you stapling polaroids of your old house to your new one & you're just waiting for October, you can cross your fingers & wish on the strongest man in the world. you can always drink an Orange Lazarus or confess it all to the voice on the other side of the ringing phone, & when it rains— when it rains, it smells like summer.

—Jessie Lynn McMains, from forget the fuck away from me (Bone & Ink Press, 2019 — available in print or digital form)

[alvoskia]

When war comes, you will be expected to end it.

[wrongpublishing]

Author reading + open mic: Briar Ripley Page (16/09/23)

Also featuring:

Sera Miles

Alexandrine Ogundimu

Buy a copy of Traveler's Tales from Wrong Publishing:

[earthlybodystudio]

My indie publishing house Sword & Kettle Press has released our new series: New Cosmologies! Across these eleven titles, you’ll read reinterpretations and retellings, original cosmologies and personal mythologies, prose and poetry, beginnings of universes and ends of worlds.

We hand-bound 100 copies of each book, and when they're gone, they're gone. Find them here!

[kjscottwrites]

Honestly pretty excited about new folks on tumblr, I'd especially love to follow some new accounts that are like....

- indie lit mags

- small book stores !

- erotica platforms

- porn & sex work advocacy orgs

- the like

If you have any recs for me I'd be so stoked to hear about them!

[dobescrusher2]

My anthology, Wolves.gay is free to read as a downloadable PDF on my itch.io page

[miserymiseryvulture]

My book came out this year, be cool if you read it.

[tannerballengee]

“Fleeing the emotional tragedies of his hometown in Kansas, Tanner Ballengee set out for Southeast Asia. The plan was to meet up with a comrade and ride motorcycles across Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia, a harsh barge

through the infamous Killing Season. The only problem was that Ballengee knew nothing about the region, even less about motorcycles, and only had the money he'd been able to save by delivering pizzas. The result is a narrative that entirely shuns the tedious pretensions of travel writing. Full of illegal camping, horny monks, and plenty of booze, Tourorist strips lust for experience to the bone.”

buy it here

[rustbeltjessie]

My old friend Pat King interviewed me for his literary video series, Back to the Underground. We discuss my writing/career from its origins in my tween and teen-aged zine years, through my Perpetual Motion Roadshow and Underground Literary Alliance days in my early-to-mid twenties, all the way to some of the things I’ve been doing in the past eight years or so—and a bunch of other stuff. I also read some excerpts from a handful of recent/ish stories and poems.

[therumpus]

"Student Hunger is an Issue on College Campuses"

Written and Illustrated by Rachel Litchman

"When I was a freshman in college, I was hungry. Hunger that was a hollow envy inside my stomach. A deep aching want. For something so simple that the circumstances had made it impossible to have."

[angeloftheodd]

Quail Pot Pie 🥧🩵 Just kidding - It’s a chicken pot pie with a chicken on it and a burnt spot that looks like a quail’s topknot. It’s meant to be, Quail Bell. 💖

[barbaragenova]

I had work on the Bear Creek Gazette, like most people; it's now been archived over at @_voidspace_zine , in its own neat section. 

  https://voidspacezine.com/bcg-corner/

[wrongpublishing]

BOOK REVIEW: Cosmic Horror Monthly's Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic: An Anthology of Hysteria Fiction 

by Elizabeth Broadbent, Staff Writer.

I stan Bertha. 

You will too once you read Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic: An Anthology of Hysteria Fiction (Cosmic Horror Monthly). Rage-made art, editor Joolie Toomajan’s anthology howls into the dark night of oppression; its fury-crafted stories push back against the true horrors of our marginalization. Come for the politics—all proceeds go to fund abortion rights in America—but stay for some of the year’s best stories, which shine against the tarnish of injustice.

There’s spec fic here for everyone: literary retellings, a redone fairy tale, sci-fi, fantasy, surrealism, ghost stories, serial killers. Fury seethes through them: fury at abandonment, fury at erasure, but (justly) often fury at objectification. We are baby-carriers, walking wombs. Our sexuality is villainous. We endanger the patriarchy by refusing to die, a la Mrs. Rochester in Laura Blackwell’s “The First Mrs. Edward Rochester Would Like a Word.” 

I finished the first two stories in this anthology (Jennifer Lee Fleck’s brutal “The Girls of Channel 9” and Joe Koch’s “By Their Bones You Shall Know Them”, which reminded me of Brian Bilston’s “America is a Gun”) and had to walk away. “This is one of the best anthologies I’ve read all year,” I told my husband as I took a breather. “I’ve only read two of them and holy shit, this is good stuff.”

You knew, of course, that Haley Piper’s would be a standout. You didn’t know how much of a standout. I might’ve cried while reading “The Girls with Claws that Catch”—bonus points if you can ID the reference. William Faulker wished he’d written Moby Dick; I’d’ve given a lesser toe to pen this one. 

I might’ve cried while reading a lot of these. 

Remember the tears you shed when you heard about Roe? Here they all, wrapped up into speculative fic. 

I could wade through every story and rave about its uniqueness, its bravery, its place in the Golden Age of Indie Horror (then thank the God of Horror Writers—nomination for Black Tezcatlipoca, Aztec god of nighttime and darkness—that I’m lucky enough to review right now). I’ll spare you, expect to say that someone other than Joolie Toomajan’s winning a Stoker for this, and I’m not sure who.

Special shoutout Laura Cranehill: Nectarine, Apple, Pear is her first published short story—and she wrote it in the midst of parenting three small kids. Laura, we best see more of your work soon. 

Buy Aseptic now; don’t wait for StokerCon. Like Ai Jiang’s Lingham, this book’s gonna sell out. 

Watch the launch party hosted by P. L. McMillan and Chelsea Pumpkins—you deserve these stellar readings in your life.

Cosmic Horror Monthly Twitter: @ CosmicHorrorMo Instagram: @ cosmic.horror.monthly

[stevepotterwrites]

Gangs With Greek Names

Someone forced open a creaky old window in one of the apartments above the alley. “Cowards,” an elderly man shouted. I couldn't see him from where I stood, but I could tell from his voice that he was old. “Three against one? Ya should be ashamed of yourselves!”

“Leave him alone, ya bullies,” an elderly woman shouted. “You're twice his size!”

“If I was a younger man, I'd come down there and knock yous all right on your tochus,” the man shouted.

“We've notified the police,” the old woman said. “The police are on the way!”

“I'd knock yous right on your tochus if I still had it in me,” the old man shouted. “I swear I would!”

None of the hoods or Greg paid attention to the concerned elderly couple shouting at them from above. Aldo grabbed the collar of Greg's blue shirt with both hands and shook him. “Hand it over,” he shouted. He let go of the shirt and shoved Greg back toward the brick wall.

That's when Greg did the coolest thing I've ever seen in my entire life. He jumped and pumped his right leg and kicked Aldo's chin with his left foot. It was wild! Aldo's head snapped back. He clutched his jaw, stumbled backward, and almost fell. I'd never seen anything like it in real life, only on TV shows like The Green Hornet or Kung Fu or in that awesome movie Billy Jack.

Part One, currently free

Complete Novel