Dear Jimmy,

Forgive me for being so informal. My initial draft began, “Dear Mr. Franco,” but after you read this, we’re going to become good buddies and nothing as formal as “Mr. Franco” will do.

You’ll call me on my cell phone and I’ll be all, “Hey Jimmy” or “Good to hear from ya Jimster” or “It’s my nigga, Jim…Oh, that’s inappropriate? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you, man. I was trying to be ironic. It’s an, um, reference to Huck Finn, which I figured you’d get because you’re a writer, like me…Oh I see…That word is not in your copy, huh?…Yeah, it’s in my copy. Some 200 hundred times… Why would I make up something like that? I’m looking at it right now… No, I don’t think he wrote two versions…No, Mr. Franco, I can’t think of any good reason why your copy says slave and mine says…Look, I think this conversation has gotten off on the wrong foot. You want to call back and we can try this again?”

Yeah, we’ll have conversations like that, complete with literary allusions because you’re a learned guy. I’m just as learned. We have the same advanced degree, Master of Fine Arts in Fiction. As a matter of fact, we have a lot in common. You write short stories. I write short stories. You act in movies. I watch movies.  Your fiction has been published in Esquire. My fiction has been rejected repeatedly from Esquire. You hosted the Academy Awards. While you hosted the Academy Awards I was on Twitter making fun of the Academy Awards.

It’s our shared love for literature and cinema that has inspired me to write you today.  As a big Hollywood powerhouse, I’ve noticed that you’ve decided to class up the place by bringing several literary-themed projects to the big screen. You made the Howl biopic about one of my favorite poets, Allen Ginsberg and lately, you’ve been optioning a whole gang of literary fiction and non-fiction including some Bukowski, a biopic on poet Hart Crane, Steve Erickson’s Zeroville and Stephen Elliot’s The Adderall Diaries. I’m wondering if you’re willing to take a chance on a writer not named Steve? I have an unpublished novel just sitting on my hard drive. I’m hoping you’d be interested in optioning it and turning it into a big Hollywood spectacle. I’ll even settle for small independent feature or even a porno flick. You were in Spiderman 3, I trust your judgment.

I’ll be straight with you Jimmy, there are some logistical problems to making this picture. For instance, all the characters in my novel are black and I’ve noticed that you’re a white guy. I know you like to act in the works you option. I assure you though, that won’t be too much of a problem. I’m totally OK with you turning any, or even all, of my characters into white people. Trust me, that’s fine. Grad school put me $50,000 in debt. Hell, if you pay me, you can perform in blackface if you want.

I know you’re probably thinking, “Why should I waste my time with some random internet literary fiction jackass.” And that’s a great question, Jimirini. I’m not only a comrade in literature, I’m also a huge fan. I still think about your magnificent turn in 127 Hours. IMDB.com says you were in Milk and I saw that and enjoyed it. Sean Penn did a hell of a job as politician Harvey Milk and memory being what it is, I kind of only remember him and guy who shot him at the end, but I liked it, loved it even, so I’m sure you had something to do with my enjoyment of that flick. And who can forget Spiderman 3?

Also, while other people on the internet made fun of your Oscar hosting, your boy Ree (You can call me, Ree, in fact I prefer it. I sign all my personal emails, Ree, but it doesn’t seem to be catching on.)  didn’t crack a single joke at your expense. Check my Twitter feed. I totally got that your delivery was an homage to the wonderful Carlo Collodi children’s novel, The Adventures of Pinocchio.

As you can see, this is a very good opportunity for you. I have no agent so it’ll be a clean transaction.  And imagine all the good press: “Franco Takes Chance on Unpublished Writer of ‘Literary’ Fiction,” “Franco to Play Black Man,” “Franco wins NAACP Image Award” or “Franco Marries Halle Berry After Meeting Her on the Set of New ‘Rion Amilcar Scott Joint.'”

Contact me, Jim, and I’ll send you my pages. I also have an unpublished short story collection and a bunch of loose short stories lying around. You can have a look at those too.

Take your time in coming to a decision; you don’t want to be brash. But don’t take too long. I’m told Ethan Hawke is also interested.

Sincerely,

Ree

Rion Amilcar Scott writes fiction all over the damn place, tweets @reeamilcarscott and blogs at datsun flambe.

And this brain love is brand spanking new. Seeing the cover of The Chronology of Water here is the first time I ever saw her name. The Chronology of Water is the kind of book that makes you want to hug it to your heart, kiss its cover, run your fingertips over the edge of each page. Let me tell you: this is one fucking high quality paperback. Hawthorne Books should be commended for providing such delightfully sensual casing for Yuknavitch’s hellish, hypnotic prose.

I thought about starting this book with my childhood, the beginning of my life. But that’s not how I remember it. I remember things in retinal flashes. Without order. Your life doesn’t happen in any kind of order. Events don’t have cause and effect relationships the way you wish they did. It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common.

My first book came out of me in a great gushing return of the repressed. Like a blood clot had loosened. My hands frenzied. Words came from my whole body, my entire life, or the lives of women and girls whose stories got stuck in their throats came gushing out. Nothing could have stopped the stories coming out of me. Even though my hands and arms and face hurt—bruised and cut from falling from a train—or a marriage—or a self in the night—I wrote story after story. There was no inside out. There were words and there was my body, and I could see through my own skin. I wrote my guts out. Until it was a book. Until my very skin made screamsong.

The Chronology of Water is published by Hawthorne Books.

—

Dawn West (b. 1987) reads, writes, and eats falafel in Ohio.

And this brain love is brand spanking new. Seeing the cover of The Chronology of Water here is the first time I ever saw her name. The Chronology of Water is the kind of book that makes you want to hug it to your heart, kiss its cover, run your fingertips over the edge of each page. Let me tell you: this is one fucking high quality paperback. Hawthorne Books should be commended for providing such delightfully sensual casing for Yuknavitch’s hellish, hypnotic prose.

I thought about starting this book with my childhood, the beginning of my life. But that’s not how I remember it. I remember things in retinal flashes. Without order. Your life doesn’t happen in any kind of order. Events don’t have cause and effect relationships the way you wish they did. It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common.

My first book came out of me in a great gushing return of the repressed. Like a blood clot had loosened. My hands frenzied. Words came from my whole body, my entire life, or the lives of women and girls whose stories got stuck in their throats came gushing out. Nothing could have stopped the stories coming out of me. Even though my hands and arms and face hurt—bruised and cut from falling from a train—or a marriage—or a self in the night—I wrote story after story. There was no inside out. There were words and there was my body, and I could see through my own skin. I wrote my guts out. Until it was a book. Until my very skin made screamsong.

The Chronology of Water is published by Hawthorne Books.

—

Dawn West (b. 1987) reads, writes, and eats falafel in Ohio.

I saw the film, “Showgirls,” with a friend in 1995. We were alone in the theater. I loved the movie from the get go, my instant-fierce love. The film received terrible reviews though; everyone said how bad Elizabeth Berkley was as Nomi Malone.

I’ve seen the movie dozens of times. I own it. Nomi is breathtaking every time. You know the poem by Robert Frost? The road not taken is never too far from the one you took. Nomi was a sad person, but she laid the mask on thick: false eyelashes and lipstick. She was neon and pissed.  I identified with her anger mostly, all that defiance and glare. I was afraid of her too. The road not taken. Her name was Nomi Malone. Nomi. Like, no me. Or every one.

Nomi spent a great deal of time in the film insisting, “I’m not a whore.”  Except she was. 

When my mother was young, right after she left my father, she was only twenty at the time, she joined a rock band and went to California and tried to become a  star. She never talked about the experience. I don’t think there was much to tell.

I joined a rock band once. Two weeks later, I returned to waitressing. I was nineteen and booed off stage in Gunnison Colorado. Two years later, I went back as Miss Coors Extra Gold and signed posters and posed with college boys for pictures and was almost mobbed. I liked being a model. I liked the male gaze on me. After a while, you’re a prisoner though: how important the pretty was. In the movie, Nomi Malone told a male dancer, “You can fuck me when you love me.”  Who loved her though? Maybe Gina Gershon’s character. Ultimately. They recognized one another, like looking into a mirror.   

When my mother left California, she returned to Colorado. Her family was in Utah. My father was in Colorado. They ran into each other in a Dennys. He sat down on a stool beside her. They started to talk. Pretty soon a second man sat on the other side of my mother. She left the restuarant with him. In Colorado, my mother got involved in drugs and prostitution. She was on a “Most Wanted” list. My mother  was busted for “solicitation and possession with intent to sell.” She worked as a hooker for an unspecified amount of time, a year or two maybe. She went to prison. And we all make mistakes.

Also, how do we differientiate?

When I was in college, a young man told me writing erotica was equivocal to prostitution. I’d just begun publishing stories in erotic anthologies and was proud of my publications. This guy burst my bubble. “You’re selling sex,” he said. “You’re a whore.”

If that’s true, I wonder how I justify punishing my mother with her past the way I did? There’s more to it, actually, but I can’t tell who’s reading my column anymore. People who could use information against me. I know that.  And you wonder why so many women use pen names. Boom! Maybe I’m paranoid because I used my mother’s past against her. I judged her; I punished her, and so why wouldn’t someone else punish me? Hey, it’s already happened. We judge each other all the time. Therefore I remain veiled and hypocritical. I suck.

Years ago, I had this reoccuring nightmare: a mob was stoning me to death. But maybe I was the mob and the woman we stoned to death was my mother. I didn’t want anyone to know who she was or how she left me, how abandoned I felt. I didn’t want to be her either. I didn’t want anyone to think that of me. Big fucking whore. Well, what if I was?

Last week, my father said I was a product of my environment, not genetics. In “Showgirls,” Nomi Malone’s father shot her mother in front of her then shot himself. She was a product of violence. This is supposed to explain her. I could explain my mother too. She never knew her father; she had more than one stepfather, and her mother was so oblivious and checked out most the time, one of those stepfathers raped my mother when she was a child. That’s what she said. My mother married my father to escape. My mother was a life long escapee. 

“I’m a rogue,” she told me once. She was on the run. A consummate drifter. No roots. No ties, nothing. I think she was pissed; I thing she was confused; I think she was afraid. A No Me. Really.

Last week I read this article in People Magazine about a woman who wrote a memoir about forgiving her stepfather for molesting her. I wonder if my mother forgave the man who raped her? The article demonstrated a problem of language though, specifically a problem of distance, so ultimately a lack of responsbility. The sentence was written in the passive voice and went something like, “She woke one night to her stepfather’s hands feeling her.” No. She woke one night and felt her stepfather feeling her up with his hands. Big difference. I’ve been thinking about this. How do you forgive someone’s hands?

You can’t.

In the past I’ve written, “My mother abandoned me to become a hooker.” Not, “After abandoning me, my mother became a hooker.” There’s a difference. In the first my mother left me in favor of life as a hooker. In the second, she left and became a hooker. So I guess it matters, and then it doesn’t. What I mean is, when my son was born, I took one look at him and fell madly in love. When I was born, my mother didn’t fall in love with me. She didn’t experience the same rush of hormones, all that biology. Is that her fault? A woman who lacks the maternal instinct is unnatural, right? Big fucking whore.  

That’s easier.

It’s not.

I’ve spent my lifetime seeking a mother. The one I could model myself after. My Genesis, a teacher, my mirror. You know how important it is? The Mother. I’ve rejected her, time after time, one after another. I go through them. I’m disappointed. Like feelings of abandonment, she’s a ghost.

“And all those lies, written lies, twisted lies
well, they weren’t lies, they weren’t lies, they weren’t lies
I never said. I never said.”
Morrissey, Speedway

I’ve never confessed to a priest. Tight-lipped, tight-lipped and evasive. There are no horrible secrets, no incredible voids of judgement. Only small things, and they are mine.

However, this is for you …

On April 9th, Dzanc will be hosting its second annual National Workshop Day, with workshops in 20+ cities all over the country (and one in Canada!). Most workshops are just $30, and are being taught by a variety of professional writers and editors, in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. Sign up today!

The Collagist is still taking submissions for our first chapbook contest until April 15th. Submissions are welcome in all genres, including short stories, novellas, flash fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. For more information on how to enter, click here.

Long thought to be a sitcom catchphrase like any other—DYN-O-MITE!—the excited refrain of James Evans, Jr., the oldest son on the Norman Lear produced family sitcom, Good Times, is perhaps the most interesting and subversive in television history.

The refrain was created by a writing staff that consisted of four former Black Panthers, two active members of the Weather Underground and a gawky red-haired Harvard Lampoon alumni named Phil. The character of JJ (played by comedian Jimmie Walker), the writers thought, was destined to be a breakout star. He would be their vehicle to slip radical calls for revolution into primetime television. All JJ needed was a catchphrase. First, the writers came up with: “Off the pig!” then “Destroy the White power structure, maaan!” Those lacked the requisite flexibility of a good catchphrase. For instance, while JJ often called himself, “Kid DYN-O-MITE!,” “Kid Off the Pig” would have been ill-fitting and awkward.

The group nearly settled for, “Throw the White man out the Windooooow,” but no one was satisfied with that. After hours of deliberation, Phil, the Ivy League grad, went out to grab dinner for the group. Thinking he needed to spend more time in the black ghetto to pick up the rhythms of speech, he went down to a nearby impoverished African-American neighborhood. Phil spent the better part of an hour hanging in a chow line, when it hit him. Yep, a piece of wood to the back of his head. Some thugs smacked him and took his wallet and car keys. By the time he returned, the other writers had figured it out. JJ would scream the name of Alfred Nobel’s explosive invention as a battle cry, a call for viewers to “DYN-O-MITE!” the White power structure that left the Evans family and others in the “gh-eee-to”— as JJ called it—poor.  For example, in the episode, “JJ Becomes a Man, “ JJ, freed from a holding cell after being cleared of a crime he didn’t commit, is asked by his little brother if he was scared while in jail. JJ responds: “Scared? Are you jivin’? At first The Man thought he was dealing with some frightened little boy, then he took one look at me and realized he was dealing with Kid a-DYN-O-MITE!”

The implications of the line are clear, it’s not the downtrodden who should fear The White power structure (The Man), but the The Man who should fear a nation of radicalized “Kids a-DYN-O-MITES!”

Outside of JJ’s catchphrase, the writers often stuck in revolutionary messages. For instance, in the landmark episode, “Junior the Senior,” JJ says: “What do I have to know Algebra for, anyway? What am I, an Algerian?” The line today is derided as the ignorant talk of a dimwitted stereotype. When it was first uttered in prime time, it was properly understood as a nod to Algeria’s anti-colonial struggle for independence against the French, a guerilla style of combat the Good Times writers hoped to reproduce in the gh-eee-to.

As the show progressed however, something got lost in translation. After the FBI raid that nabbed the entire Good Times writing staff on suspicion of conspiracy and subversive activity, which included, ironically, the purchase of dynamite for use in illegal acts, the new writing staff failed to wield JJ’s catchphrase as a political tool and the show lost most of its edge. JJ’s radical persona was shoved aside and his little brother Michael became the vehicle for a more measured and liberal brand of commentary.

“Free the Good Times 7 or we a-DYN-O-MITE!” became a popular cry in the late seventies. It was plastered on t-shirts,  scrawled on placards and shouted at rallies. The state eventually dropped all charges against six of them. Phil, though maintaining his innocence, was convicted on several counts of conspiracy and is still locked up in a federal facility.

Later, the team went on to write for Diff’rent Strokes where they invented the subsequently altered catchphrase, “Whatchu talkin’ about, Whitey.”

Rion Amilcar Scott writes fiction all over the damn place, tweets @reeamilcarscott and blogs at datsun flambe.

Did you catch this new fiction from Chelsea Laine Wells over at Housefire?

Prick of the Spindle 5.1 includes writing from CL Bledsoe, twice, Len Kuntz, Tim Tomlinson, Andrea Kneeland once twice thrice,  and others.

At Small Doggies, Amber Sparks talks about what she’s reading.

A review from Sarah Sarai appears at The Rumpus.

Our Island of Epidemics gets a nice little mention here.

Erin Fitzgerald compiled an amazing Storybucket featuring several PANK contributors.

Smokelong 31 includes Tracy Gonzalez, Casey Hannan,Mike Meginnis, Ethel Rohan,and Angi Becker Stevens.

Matt Bell has news at No News Today.

This week at Metazen, Tania Hershman.

In the new issue of Action Yes, five poems by Melissa Broder.

April elimae: Jimmy Chen, Nick Ripatrazone, Adam Moorad,Dennis Mahagin, Helen Vitoria,Katie Jean Shinkle, Mel Bosworth, and Meg Pokrass.

Jac Jemc has a gorgeous new chapbook called These Strangers She’d Invited Inavailable for purchase from Greying Ghost Press for only $6.50.

At the Fwriction Review, a story by the one and only and exceptional Frank Hinton.

Congratulations to Lauren Becker on celebrating the first anniversary of the always gorgeous Corium magazine. This anniversary issue includes Brian Oliu, Donna Vitucci, Faith Gardner, Sean Lovelace, twice, Sara Crowley, Andrea Kneeland twice, and Joseph A.W. Quintela.

Check out this fine conversation between Blake Butler and Matt Bell at HTMLGIANT.

Chances are, if you don’t work in the magical world of advertising, then you’re probably not aware of what company taglines originally looked like before they evolved into their present state. For instance, did you know that Volkswagon’s “Drivers Wanted” tagline was originally “Get in the fucking car”? The tagline then went through a series of changes, from “I want you to get in the car” to “I’m the driver and I want you to get in the car” to “Driver wants you to get in” to “Drivers Wanted.” Crazy. Well, below, you’ll find more first drafts to some of the most famous taglines ever. This is the first time they’ve ever been released to the general public, so you’re welcome!

……………….

Make two columns in Microsoft Excel, label one ‘Pros,’ the other ‘Cons’ and, if the pros outweigh the cons, just do it. — Nike

The very highest rank in a monarchy as far as beers are concerned. — Budweiser

Fine, have it your way. Christ. — Burger King

Analagous to a rock. — Chevy

It’s everywhere you want to be and also everywhere you don’t want to be because, let’s face it, more often than not, you’re not where you want to be. — Visa

You’re an asshole. — Wendy’s Hamburgers

For the woman who sweats like a hairy dude. — Secret Deodorant

Edible. — Subway

That cow over there? It’s what’s for dinner. Now let’s carve that bitch up. — National Cattlemen’s Beef

Got cola? How about some fruit punch? Well, what have you got? Milk? That’s all, just milk? Fine, I guess. — California Milk Processor Board

Slightly ahead of its time. Just slightly, though. Seriously, we don’t think it’s a significant amount. — Panasonic

The last drop? Not so much. — Maxwell House

Bring us your children. — McDonald’s

We make money the old-fashioned way. No, not dowries. The other old-fashioned way. — Smith Barney

Not sure why we even need a tagline, really. — Sun Microsystems

Think like someone other than yourself. — Apple

You’re in good hands with Allstate. A little clammy today, but still. Good hands. — Allstate

Great, I’m out of Zoloft. Well, it’s up to you, Calgon. Take me away. — Calgon

……………….

Do you know of any other first-draft taglines? Throw them down there in the old comment box.