writer

Attention: My Novel STILL ALIVE to make its Zoom Reading debut, Wednesday, March 22, at 7:30pm CT

*A group of Malarkey authors is called a Murder. Like crows.*

You’re invited to join us, Wednesday, March 22, at 7:30pm CT for an evening of great literature and general authorial mayhem. (Double check the time-zone so you don’t miss out!!!)

RSVP here and you’ll receive a Zoom invite the day of the event.

I’ll be reading from my forthcoming novel STILL ALIVE (2024) and possibly wearing sequins. Possibly. The other authors in the line-up will be reading from their amazing books. It’s going to be thrilling! Only five minutes each! Truly a smorgasbord of literature.

See you soon!!

Publication Announcement: MOSKVA, A Short Story

One of the strangest parts of writing stories and poems and essays (and even and especially novels) is that they enter the world long after you finish them.

MOSKVA, published by Hobart Pulp today, had a shorter finished-to-published timeline than most (two months!). Then again, it only took me seventeen years to figure out how to write it…

Joshua Hebburn, the guest editor who selected this piece, will be releasing MOSKVA along with a selection of other great work in a digital e-zine in the coming months. I’ll give you a heads up when that happens too!

As always, if you feel like sharing MOSKVA on Reddit or boosting it elsewhere, you will have my forever thanks. And YES, let’s be friends on Twitter (it’s so much better than facebook these days).

Sending much love, xo —

HUSBANDRY Now Available to Read Online (for FREE)

After what “seems like an eon and a half of pre-production lead up,”* my short story HUSBANDRY is finally available for the general public to read on the Los Angeles Review website without a price of admission:

Thank you for your love and support. (If you feel like sharing HUSBANDRY on Reddit or boosting it elsewhere, you will have my forever thanks.)

Sending love and a hug and a wish to tell stories on a porch together again, someday,

*according to my beloved.

HUSBANDRY available to read in Issue 23 of the Los Angeles Review from Red Hen Press

Two years ago we were rounding out our first year in Los Angeles when I won the short fiction contest at the Los Angeles Review. The news felt like a blessing on an already good year — we came West in the hope that California would be a good home for the next chapter of our lives and 2018 seemed to say: you did good.

But that was two years ago. Right now we’re in the middle of a pandemic and LA County looks like it’s in a race with Florida for the number of new COVID cases per day. We spend most of our time at home with our pets. Even though it is true that every day of our lives holds the promise of something unexpected, that truth feels more raw and real right now.

So it is with relief and hope and an attempt to invite you into my co-joy that I share the news that my short story, HUSBANDRY, is finally available to read in the late-released Issue 23 of the Los Angeles Review.

HUSBANDRY is about a bull who wakes up as a woman—and what it means to be lonely, and other, and still find your person in this world. It’s about gender and sexuality and pastoral life and what time does to who we are.

I’m honored to be featured alongside a number of amazing writers and artists and I hope you’ll consider buying a copy and giving it a read. These independent presses survive on razor thin margins and every little bit counts towards keeping them alive. If you like interesting writing that isn’t your typical cookie-cutter beach read, especially, check them out. More about Red Hen Press can be found here.

Love to all and Happy Friday!!

xo, LJ

WILD GEESE IN THE AGE OF LATE CAPITALISM

By: LJ Pemberton and Tye Pemberton

You do not have to be call-your-wife-mom good.
You do not have to walk on your knees in Guantanamo or
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting (as Weezer’s Africa cover
plays on repeat.)
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what Madison Avenue tells it to love.
Tell me about political despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on in a climate-denying march towards human extinction.
Meanwhile the sun and the acid pebbles of the rain
are moving across the dying landscapes,
over the fracked up prairies and the lost deep trees,
the mined mountains and the polluted rivers.
Meanwhile the last wild geese, high in the unclean, blue-ish air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how very lonely,
the ad world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like those last wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your temporary place
in the family of things.

The Truth is Out There

Monday mornings are like the moment the hot water runs out in a long shower: real, expected, and nonetheless unwelcome. Because it takes a monumental effort for me to enter the week dressed in a simulacrum of normal personhood, I like to spend the first part of the day distracting myself with ideas that make me feel new and engaged and alive. Now that I am doing these posts / emails, it is my pleasure to share some of today’s with you. —LJ

ASS OUT OF ME AND U
The class politics of decluttering
Problems we don’t really want to solve

PLACES
North Korea looks like a Wes Anderson movie, or Wes Anderson movies look like North Korea
A curated journey through Atlanta’s history
Explore the Cincinnati panorama of 1848
Turkmenistan: where the cities are beautiful and empty and the neighborhoods are crowded and cluttered

LITERATURE MAKES IT POSSIBLE FOR ME TO WAKE UP IN THE MORNING
Essays by poet Kenneth Rexroth
The teeny-tiny writing of Charlotte Brontë

HI-LOW
Make fancy cocktails using Hi-C EctoCooler
When Henry Cotton of Moze (in Essex) was reported in 1592 for not attending church, he came before the local churchwardens, and ‘very unreverently and contemptuously farted unto them and said, “Present that to the court”’.
Taylor Swift swallows the world (and it ain’t a good thing)

GNOTHI SEAUTON
Grief Magic
Hallucinatory voices shaped by local culture
Paris Review interview with Adam Phillips:

“There are a number of people whom you might think of as casualties of the myth of the artist. They really should have done something else. Of course some people get lucky and find that art works for them, but for so many people it doesn’t. I think that needs to be included in the picture. Often one hears or reads accounts in which people will say, Well, he may have treated his children, wives, friends terribly, but look at the novels, the poems, the paintings. I think it’s a terrible equation. Obviously one can’t choose to be, as it were, a good parent or a good artist, but if the art legitimates cruelty, I think the art is not worth having. People should be doing everything they can to be as kind as possible and to enjoy each other’s company. Any art, any anything, that helps us do that is worth having. But if it doesn’t, it isn’t.”

Image credit: Mark Rothko, Four Darks in Red, 1958.