Pete Pazmino

I’m pretty excited about the fact that Colin Meldrum, editor of A cappella Zoo (which published my short story “Singing Bucket” in issue 3), has invited me to join a handful of other AZ authors in a reading he’s organized at the upcoming AWP Conference in Washington, DC. The conference runs from February 2-5 at the Marriott Wardman Park & Omni Shoreham Hotels; we’ll be reading on the 4th at the Eighteenth Street Lounge. The other authors who’ll be reading from their works published in AZ include Ian Denning, Prartho Sereno, Crystal J. Hoffman, Rae Bryant, Travis Blankenship, and Mike Meginnis. There will also be writers there representing Weave and Ampersand. If you’re attending the conference or will be in town, come on out!

My short story “Mountains” was just recently published by /One/: The Journal of Literature, Art and Ideas. I’m excited about being included in this journal, which is relatively new (they launched in 2009). They’ve published some very good material by some very talented writers (including Adrienne Rich!) in the short time they’ve been around. It’s also the first story I’ve ever published that included an author photo alongside it. So that’s something.

The story, by the way, is an older one I started back while I was earning my MA at Hopkins. I believe the earliest version of it, which weighed in at something ridiculous like 6,000 words, first appeared in a workshop being led by Elly Williams (author of the novel This Never Happened). It started with a long, rambling, totally overblown exposition in which the main character was standing at a window in the dark and thinking very bad thoughts. It took about three pages for anything to happen. My friend Ali, who was also in the class, commented that it seemed to her like the story really started with a conversation that took place much later (and was presented in flashback, to boot). I think it’s some of the best story-specific advice I ever got in a workshop. So thanks for that, Ali.

Anyway, you can read the story here: http://onethejournal.com/2010/10/mountains/.

Brink Magazine released their new issue today, and their fiction selection was my short story, “mija.” I started writing this story so long ago that I barely remember it. The original file for it on my computer, dated July of 2005, is called “Car Journey,” which seems like a really stupid name. I remember that, at the time, I imagined I was starting a novel. I don’t remember how it was going to be long enough to be a novel, but I remember that’s what it was going to be.

Somewhere over the next year, though, the story stopped being a potential novel and started being nothing at all, which is to say that I stopped working on it entirely. I don’t remember why. Maybe I had realized by then that it had no novel potential whatsoever and I was getting tired of working on it. But then, sometime after I started my MA program at Hopkins, I re-discovered it while rummaging through the hard drive of the computer I was about to get rid of and realized that it might be worth saving. Not as a novel, certainly, but as a short story that I ended up liking a lot. I’m happy to see it placed in Brink Magazine, too…I’ve been reading them for years. They rejected me once before (no hard feelings there), but it was a kind rejection, and I’m happy to see that my second at-bat with them turned out for the better.

Anyway, check the story out here: http://www.brinklit.com/fiction/mija-by-pete-pazmino.

I am (seriously) working on some longer material for this blog, a few pieces about rejection and point of view and some other stuff that I hope to have ready within a week or two. Or maybe three or four, who knows. But in the meantime, since it’s been so long since I’ve posted and I’ve got this spiffy new layout going on (thanks, Eric!) I figured that I’d just add a quick note about two new stories I’ve just had published.

The first is a flash piece I wrote some months ago called “dmv.” It was inspired–surprise, surprise–by a trip I took to the local DMV for some dreary task or another. A group of children in back spent the entire time I was there chanting some silly song that I’d never heard before, and that was all it took. The chant I used in the story is actually pretty close to what I heard that day; I’ve taken a few liberties with it, and then very generous liberties with everything else. You’ll find the story here, posted on a little online journal called The Camel Saloon that’s run by a man named Russell Streur, with whom I’ve had some very interesting and informative email exchanges. More on those in another post, somewhere down the line.

The second story is one I wrote several years ago, during my time at Johns Hopkins. It’s entitled “Crawl,” and it’s been circling about looking for a home for quite some time. It landed, finally, here, in the second issue of The Meadowland Review, and I couldn’t be happier. The journal looks great, and the material in it is pretty high quality across the board. I’m proud to be a part of it.

My short story “Uncle Daddy” was just published by You Must Be This Tall To Ride, a great online journal with a special place in its heart for that old stalwart, the coming-of-age story.

I’ve always been a fan of this particular genre. I can’t say that a lot of what I write falls into it in the most traditional sense of the term—I mean, when I hear “coming of age,” I think of confused teenagers learning hard lessons that they’ll look back on somewhat melodramatically in years to come. Or young children confronted with an event in their lives that forces them to grow up far faster than they probably should, or at least want to. After all, I taught high school and middle school English for eight years; I know what these sort of stories sound like. They’re about all you find in English textbooks anymore, and I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing.

But I don’t really think that’s all the genre is. In fact, I think that a vast majority of what gets written is, in some way, shape, or form, a coming-of-age story. Because stories are, ultimately, about what moves us or changes us, and if something moves or changes you, then shouldn’t it qualify? I’m in my late middle thirties now, and I’d be lying through my teeth if I didn’t admit that there are plenty of times when I look back on something that’s just happened to me and feel as though I’ve just crossed some boundary, as though I’ve just taken one more in a seemingly endless line of small steps into adulthood. I’m still waiting, in fact, for the day when a big bundled package arrives in the mail from some fancy-named government agency welcoming me into the Official Adult Club. That’s how I thought it happened when I was a kid, anyway. Being an adult was supposed to mean you knew all the answers, you got along with everyone, you always knew what to do and when to do it and how to do it the best it could be done. So what happened to that? Because I never got the memos.

So, really, we’re all coming of age, all the time. And all stories are coming-of-age stories, in a sense. We’re just all coming to different ages. We’re all waiting for different things.

“Uncle Daddy,” in any case, is a coming-of-age story of the more traditional variety. Pre-teen girl, social discomfort, family issues. I had a lot of fun writing this one. It started on a trip I took to Detroit, when I heard someone use the term “uncle daddy” in passing. That brought, clear as day, the opening scene into my head. The rest followed with almost scary ease, and it’s nice to see it online.

Thanks to You Must Be This Tall To Ride for publishing this piece. You can read it here: http://youmustbethistalltoride.net/stories/view/71.

It’s always an interesting exercise to Google yourself. A little narcissistic, perhaps, and possibly fraught with peril if there are things out there about yourself that you’d rather not find, but who can honestly say he’s not curious about his own Web presence (or lack thereof)?

I can’t. So I Googled myself. And was pleased to find some nice, easy links to stories I’ve published online. A lot of hits focused around my short story Chowbang, which was published in the Fall 2008 issue of JMWW, collected into their third annual anthology (available for purchase, incidentally, here), and nominated for the StorySouth Million Writers Award (it did not, sadly, place, although Jessica Anya Blau’s excellent Number 7, also in the same anthology, was a finalist). I also found a link to an article about the launch party for that anthology, which took place at Cyclops in Baltimore and where all of the writers, including me, read our contributions.

And then I found an unexpected gem. A short review of Chowbang on a blog entitled Short Story Reader, which I’ve never read before. I love this site, and not just because my review was good. I mean, it was good, very good—my story got a nice write-up and five out of five stars. But what I love about this site is that the person who’s keeping it, Jon Morgan Davies, is doing a damn impressive job of collecting and intelligently commenting on stories from all over the Web. Take some time to read through his reviews and the linked stories…you won’t be sorry that you did.

Regarding the review of Chowbang, though, I just have to say that this is the first actual “review” I’ve ever read of my own work that wasn’t coming from a writing group or editor giving personal feedback. It was definitely a nice thing to hear. I probably wouldn’t be feeling the same way about it had it been more critical, of course, but hey. I’ll take what I can get and enjoy it while I can.

You can read the review (and more of the blog) here.

I was thinking this evening, while clearing dinner’s dirty dishes out of the sink and listening to the Redskins begin what’s looking like will be another in a long line of miserable games, about writer’s block. Specifically, the kind of writer’s block in which you’re not really blocked, so to speak, but rather overcome by an overwhelming urge to do anything but. You have the ideas, but not the desire, which seems ridiculous no matter how you look at it. I mean, the ideas are supposed to be the hard part, right? Why should sitting down and typing them be so damned difficult?

I blame the Internet. Well, not entirely, but a little at least. It’s just too easy to get distracted. I mean, you’re sitting there at your computer, a blank Word document open in front of you and that cursor mocking you with its steady blinking in the corner, and what do you do? I’ll tell you what you do. You click over to Firefox and jump to CNN, or to Fark, or to Duotrope, or to any one of about a thousand other websites that then pull you into their time-sucking embrace. And if it’s not the Internet, it’s something else. Washing the dishes. Doing laundry. Catching up on some reading. Playing video games. Waking the dog from her couch-bound slumber for a game of fetch. Cleaning the bathroom.

You know it’s bad when you’re cleaning the bathroom.

I know that I’m not the only one with this problem. But knowing that there are others out there struggling with his same issue – and I’m pretty sure that there are lots of writers out there struggling with this issue – is hardly comforting. Why is it that something from which we derive so much enjoyment and personal satisfaction is often so hard to even minimally do? Is, in fact, something that we’ll actually invent work to get out of doing? It makes absolutely no sense. It is, in fact, a sort of masochism, a type of self-inflicted punishment. And, afterward, as you surrender and make your way to bed, comes the gnawing guilt. The sinking realization that you’ve lost a half hour, an hour, an entire evening’s worth of time that you could have been using to write. It’s a sad state of affairs, and it’s just how I’m feeling right now as the Redskins go even further into the hole. Seventeen zip and the game’s not half over.

But you know what? You know what I just realized? I’m writing right now. That’s crazy. That’s meta-crazy. Here I am, lamenting my guilt-ridden writer’s block through a multi-paragraph blog post.

Ah, the Internet. Like Homer Simpson’s beer, it is truly the cause – and cure – of all our problems. And the Redskins just scored, so there’s hope.

Menda City Review just published my short story, “Snake.” This story has had a long road. I composed the first draft back when I was working on my MA in fiction at Johns Hopkins, sometime during early 2007; it came in bloated and huge at something like 8,000 words. Two years later, after losing almost half its word weight and accumulating a healthy pile of rejection slips from a healthy assortment of publications, it found its home. I’m happy with it, and happy to see it out there.

I must say that Terry Rogers, Menda City Review’s editor, was both insightful and on-target in the comments and suggestions he had on this piece, and it was a pleasure to work with him.

You’ll find “Snake” on the MCR website here: http://mendacitypress.com/10.2009Pazmino.html.

So.

So I’ve been doing the whole writing thing for a while now, and just the other day was very surprised to receive a friend request on Facebook from a stranger who, in his email, said that he’d encountered some of my work online and really liked it. Which was tremendously flattering, of course, but also led me into a somewhat absurd and lengthy reflection on whether or not to “friend” someone I don’t know at all. I mean, I’m one of those people who really just uses Facebook to maintain connections with people I actually know or have known, and it makes me a little leery to step outside that. But, at the same time, I think it’s clear that, if I’m going to continue to be serious as a writer — which, of course, is my intent — I need something.

So, here it is.

I’m afraid this is going to be a slow endeavor, but the initial parts (getting the domain, setting up email, writing this first post so it’s not just the silly WordPress greeting that the hordes of people I’m sure will be stampeding to get here will see) are finished. I’ll continue building this, posting when I have some time, adding links, and so forth as I can. Meanwhile, if you’d like to contact me, please feel free to do so via email: pete [at] petepazmino.com.