50 Word Story Segment, Part 1

Welcome to the first of a new installment here on the blog called 50 Word Story Segment. The idea here is that I ask writers who I admire and enjoy, but who you might not know all that much about, to write a fifty word story and answer six questions afterwards about them and their writing. Sounds cool, right? Hopefully, I’ll post a new one each week.

Our premiere segment concerns writer Mike Young, editor of NOO Journaland author of much. Without further ado, enjoy, and tell your friends and watch for more of these as the weeks come.

HORN WON’T CHANGE THE MENU

Who could Horn tell? Tooth in the burger, pissed off snowmobiler. See, Horn’s dad opened Truckee Grill when miners still dumped silt from their galoshes. Well. Not really. Life exaggerates its ribbons. In April, he died. Snow off the pines: suddenly, finally. “I’m sorry,” Horn says. “It’s on the house.”

And here’s the interview:

Q: Where did this story come from? Describes its genesis?
A; I asked Kendra Grant Malone what I should write a 50 word story about. She told me sandwiches. I thought of a trip I’d taken in January or so to a snowmobiling village in the Sierra Nevadas.

Q: Who are you? What makes you so amazingly cool that we just had to interview you?
A: I don’t know. Am I amazingly cool? The last time I shaved, I tried to make myself look more like the guy from The Killers. Not a cool act. But who’s making the ledger these days, right? I co-edit NOÖ Journal, a free literary/cultural magazine. My work has appeared in a smattering of journals. Links here: http://mike.noojournal.com. My story “Ten Gallon Bucket of Fries” will appear in Online Writing: The Best of the First Ten Years, edited by Doug Martin and Kim Chinquee. That’s pretty cool, right? These days I live in Amherst, Massachusetts, where I’m “doing” the UMass MFA program. Spring’s a flirt.

Q: What are you working on right now? Can you tell us? Stores? Poems? Novels? One of those tiny ships in a bottle?
A: My big project right now is called MC Oroville’s Answering Machine, a series of prose flurries/poems, which will arrive as a chapbook from Transmission Press sometime this year. MC Oroville is an actual emcee from my hometown of Oroville, CA. The pieces are like crazy things left on his answering machine, inspired in part by the Oroville Openline, a feature in the local paper where you can call in and say any skittish thing you want and the paper will print it. Mostly. The chapbook will be like neopolitan ice cream poetry: narrative, l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e=y, some collage, some kidnapped song lyrics, detuned fiddles, coleslaw, horse teeth, police tape, Skoal, and featuring 2 1/2 allusions to Kenneth Patchen’s Hallelujah Anyway. Pieces from the project are currently online at elimae, Juked, Pequin, and Blake Butler’s roundhouse shitkick of a magazine Lamination Colony.

After MC Oroville’s done I’m going to write a novel set (kind of) in Klamath Falls, OR.

Q: Think fast: favorite short story or novel at the moment? Of all time?
A: Favorite short story is maybe Thom Jones’s “I Want to Live!” Totally not the answer I thought I’d give. Novel? Hmm. McCarthy’s Suttree. Sure, that sounds right. At the moment, I’m re-reading Already Dead by Denis Johnson. Yikes. Yum.

Q: If you could start a band full of writers, of literary greats and contemporary stars, who would be in your band and what instrument would they be on (four or five members only, otherwise the van gets too crowded and smelly)?
A: This is a good question. Gnarly. Barry Hannah sings and plays drums. Cormac McCarthy plays the violin. Frank O’Hara plays the piano. Frank Stanford plays standup bass and weeps. Marina Tsvetaeva is the sexy lead singer, and D’J Pancake plays a rainworn acoustic Martin lead.

Q: What’s on the horizon for you? What’s next—i.e., publications, events/readings, etc.
A: I’ve mentioned “professional” stuff in the earlier questions. So I will just say that I need a new bike.

Thanks for hanging with us, Mike. Bikes are awesome.