Wake Island

Jump down the rabbit hole with Gina and I - in this episode we talk about: the enchantment of malls, movies like It Follows/Poltergeists/Showgirls, child beauty pageants, synesthesia, pandemic dreams, the final girl archetype, and the lost magic of video stores. Gina's book Night Rooms is an atmospheric dreamscape of memories intertwined with horror movies. Night Rooms is out now from Two Dollar Radio.

 "Jumping between past and present with ease, Nutt slashes to the center of issues like motherhood and depression and ultimately emerges as the quintessential final girl of her own film... Nutt has a knack for short, sharp lines that skip the brain and go straight to the heart." —Gabino Iglesias, NPR 

“In a horror movie, an infected character may hide a bite or rash, an urge, an unwellness. She might withdraw or act out, or behave as if nothing is the matter, nothing has happened. Any course of action opposite saying how she feels suggests suffering privately is preferable to the anticipated betrayal of being cast out.” 

Gina Nutt is the author of the poetry collection Wilderness Champion. She earned her MFA from Syracuse University. Her writing has appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, Joyland, Ninth Letter, and other publications. 

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius 

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David and I drill down into the emendation point of Americana’s psychic crisis and investigate its rotten core. We also talk about seediness, the uncanny and drift.  

David Leo Rice is the author of ‘A Room in Dodge City’ (Alternating Current, 2017) and ‘A Room in Dodge City 2’ (Alternating Current, 2021), ‘Angel House’ (Kernpunkt, 2019) a Dennis Cooper ‘Book of the Year’ and ‘The PornME Trilogy’ (The Opiate Books, 2020). His short fiction has been been published in Hobart, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, DIAGRAM and The Rupture, among many other venues.  David currently teaches creative writing at The New School.   

The article we reference is: On Seediness, Undead Literature, and Reengaging with the American Mythic in the 2020s   

Preorder - ‘Drifter: Stories’ (11:11 Press, 2021)   

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius   

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Audrey Szasz (aka Zutka) is a London-based writer with roots in Central Europe. Her experimental narratives combine vivid prose with exotic imagery and transgressive satire. Tears of a Komsomol Girl (Infinity Land Press, 2020) is her first full-length novel. She has been described alternately as ‘the postmodern heir to the disarranged novels of Anna Kavan and more closely, Ann Quin,’ and ‘a deviant genius of surreal and perverse image-play.’ Audrey’s debut in print, Plan for the Abduction of J.G. Ballard (a collaboration with Jeremy Reed) was published in 2019 via Infinity Land Press. In February 2020, Amphetamine Sulphate issued her first solo novella, Invisibility: A Manifesto.

Tears of a Komsomol Girl is an experimental concept novel based on the real-life crimes of Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, who was finally executed in 1994 having been convicted of murdering 52 people between 1978 and 1990.

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius

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In November 2013, Rose Andersen's younger sister Sarah died of an overdose in the bathroom of her boyfriend's home in a small town with one of the highest rates of opioid use in the state. Like too many of her generation, she had become addicted to heroin. Sarah was 24 years old.   To imagine her way into Sarah's life and her choices, Rose revisits their volatile childhood, marked by their stepfather's omnipresent rage. As the dysfunction comes into focus, so does a broader picture of the opioid crisis and the drug rehabilitation industry in small towns across America. And when Rose learns from the coroner that Sarah's cause of death was a methamphetamine overdose, the story takes a wildly unexpected turn.  

"The memoir of a sister's death in which the line between overdose and murder becomes blurred, The Heart and Other Monsters is the story of two girls wounded by addiction and simultaneously troubled and sustained by a broken, complex family whose actions frequently fall short of their ideals. With the fierce honesty of Domenica Ruta's With or Without You, this is the most clear sighted depiction I know of what it's like to piece life together after a great, irreparable loss, and a deft navigation of the byways and channels leading up to that loss, through it, and beyond." - Brian Evenson, author of SONG FOR THE UNRAVELING OF THE WORLD 

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius 

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Eileen Myles (they/them) came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet. Their books include For Now (an essay/talk about writing), I Must Be Living Twice/new and selected poems, and Chelsea Girls. They showed their photographs in 2019 at Bridget Donahue, NYC. Eileen has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and an award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. They live in New York and Marfa, TX.

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius

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During this conversation we talk about jail dildos and Los Angeles.  Eris marries starry-eyed feral lust with California decadence and punk poetry in a sensory carnival of bleary abstraction and bubblegum. Meet Madzi, our narrator’s dream girl, Rorschach of the feminine ideal, a hot mess dripping sex appeal and riling you up, making your life magical and sublime before leaving a trail of dirty clothes and synthetic rails into your worst nightmare.  

Ruthless Little Things is a tender, sorehearted transmission from a self-made prison, and an earnest flight toward escape. It is manic, sanguine, surreal, sad and revealing. Its lines burn themselves into you. It wreaks havoc and it never lies to you.  Elizabeth Victoria Aldrich speaks more truth in this slim elegant glitterbomb than most writers speak in an entire lifetime. — James Nulick, author of The Moon Down to Earth

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius

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A young woman is found dead on the floor of a Tijuana hotel room. An ID in a nearby purse reads “Atlantis Black.” The police report states that the body does not seem to match the identification, yet the body is quickly cremated and the case is considered closed. 

So begins Betsy Bonner’s search for her sister, Atlantis, and the unraveling of the mysterious final months before Atlantis’s disappearance, alleged overdose, and death. With access to her sister’s email and social media accounts, Bonner attempts to decipher and construct a narrative: frantic and unintelligible Facebook posts, alarming images of a woman with a handgun, Craigslist companionship ads, DEA agent testimony, video surveillance, police reports, and various phone calls and moments in the flesh conjured from memory. Through a history only she and Atlantis shared—a childhood fraught with abuse and mental illness, Atlantis’s precocious yet short rise in the music world, and through it all an unshakable bond of sisterhood—Bonner finds questions that lead only to more questions and possible clues that seem to point in no particular direction. In this haunting memoir and piercing true crime account, Bonner must decide how far she will go to understand a sister who, like the mythical island she renamed herself for, might prove impossible to find. 

“A haunting, mind-bending memoir. . . . riveting.” —New York Times  

“A mixture of biography and true crime, this narrative . . . offers more plot twists, shocking revelations and shady characters than most contemporary thrillers.” —NPR  

Betsy Bonner is the author of the poetry collection Round Lake. She is a former Director of the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center, where she now teaches creative writing. She is a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and the T. S. Eliot House. 

 "Core" Written & performed by Atlantis Black Home demo (2002) 

 "Core" (cover) Written by Atlantis Black Tara Sullivan on vox, guitars, and bass Stephen Edwards on drums Home demo (2020) 

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius 

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Photographer and long haul truck driver Ryan Shorosky is the guest.   

Ryan and I spoke while he was driving from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles. Ride shotgun with us as we discuss: how Ryan became a truck driver, stories from the road, what has it been like to work during the pandemic, how Ryan synthesizes his vocation with his aesthetic vision, and the stillness of photography in contrast to the motion of the road.  

Ryan's photography has appeared in TIME, The New York Times, The New Yorker, L'Officiel USA, Vogue, and more.  

Make sure to follow Ryan on Instagram at: https://instagram.com/ryshorosky 

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius 

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Poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert is the guest. She is the author of The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays. We get into: soul ravaging poetry, Sassy Magazine, the atmospheric charge of 2016, the unreality of our moment, morbid glee, and more!   

The Unreality of Memory collects provocative, searching essays on disaster culture, climate anxiety, and our mounting collective sense of doom. In this new collection, acclaimed poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert explores our obsessions with disasters past and future, from the sinking of the Titanic to Chernobyl, from witch hunts to the plague. These deeply researched, prophetic meditations question how the world will end―if indeed it will―and why we can’t stop fantasizing about it. 

Elisa Gabbert is the author of five collections of poetry, essays, and criticism: The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays, out now from FSG Originals and Atlantic UK; The Word Pretty (Black Ocean, 2018); L’Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems (Black Ocean, 2016); The Self Unstable (Black Ocean, 2013); and The French Exit (Birds LLC, 2010). The Unreality of Memory and The Word Pretty were both named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and The Self Unstable was chosen by the New Yorker as one of the best books of 2013. She writes a regular poetry column for the New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine and Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the Guardian Long Read, the London Review of Books, A Public Space, the Paris Review Daily, American Poetry Review, and many other venues. 

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius 

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Twitter: @WakeIslandPod

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