by your roving reporter, Shaun Grub
(how much you wanna bet dumzine will live forever)
har har as if that's very clever.
This is roving reporter Shaun Grub (of the weird heroic duo the Grub Bros). You don't know anything about me, but it's aight. I arrived here from a long, strange and twisted journey after graduating from high school at Joe T. Robinson in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1983. After that I went to UALR to begin my Freshman year exploring creative writing under the professorship of David Jauss. That's when I met Mona, three years older than me; we quickly hit it off and began dating. Once we were lovers...can they understand?
She introduced me to the music of David Bowie and Lou Reed & the Velvet Underground. I already was an Iggy Pop fan, so that annealed the trifecta. Prior to meeting Mona, I hadn't been introduced to the underground world of gay bars and going clubbing.
Mona was my vector into the realm of actual living punks. One of the more outgoing ones (for some reason I'm thinking his name was Paul, but I'm not at all certain all these years later) would brazenly drop trou, squat and do the dooky out on the sidewalk in front of the club late at night after last call had died out, it was just one of his rebellious quirks. Various goths and punks hung around, smoking cigarettes and paired or grouped off in discussions, mostly amused at the sight. It was nothing, so I stood and tried not to look as if I were staring at him. That scene certainly left an impression on me. I can remember that Sisters of Mercy FLOODLAND was playing very loudly from inside the building, at some point that night. It was the first time I'd heard music in a club at such a loud volume. I thought it was amazing. I'm trying to remember if I'd even started drinking alcohol, at that formative time of my life. I'm going to take a guess and say yes. I remember Mona used to take me to the military balls, back in those halcyon days. Those were the days of burning out fire with gasoline.
[This Xerox of an old sort of concrete poem I wrote, just over a decade after those years trapped under the lid of a steaming, recalcitrant youth simmering along the rim of the Ozarks, designates another chapter in my developing life as a poet and artist. With hormones going full bore and a sense of pure adventure running through our veins 24/7, we were up for anything back then.]
I'm trying to remember some of my creative writing instructors at Arkansas Tech University. (I remember one of them wrote smut as a sideline to bring in money, "D.C.” or something, if I recall correctly; he was quite a character.) I transferred there after one semester at UALR because ATU offered a creative writing degree. It was there that my best friend Greg & I met Craig Fields, who was to also become one of the best friends I ever had in this life. Craig responded to the hand drawn D&D posters we'd pinned up across various bulletin boards on campus. [Greg & I = The Grub Bros] That was when Greg and I actually got lucky and ended up as roommates by sheer coincidence, as if our mutual energy fields made it so. The previous tenants had painted an eye with a pyramid over the legend THE TEMPLE OF ETERNAL ROCK upon the surface of our dorm room's door. Another perfect piece of synchronicity, in which we fit like fated missing jigsaw puzzle pieces.
By the time I got to Emerson college in Boston (I'd had enough of the radioactive sunsets in Russellville), my mentors would become Ray Ronci (Zen monk poet), the eccentric genius Bill Knott, and the unfathomably meticulous Franz Wright, with whom I eventually became great friends. Franz and I often haunted the late night cobblestone streets of Boston together, plastered out of our minds, with his arm wrapped around me snug and gripping me tight, while we rambled on about every subject under the stars. Strangely enough, Franz passed from our mortal realm on my 50th birthday back in 2015, having left a permanent impression on my life and the lives of many others.
It's strange and altogether too appropriate that along the wild course of my life I'd eventually meet and befriend another fantastic writer, John Shirley.
Synthographic art by Charles Carter for the flash fiction story VOICES, by John Shirley appearing in the 30th issue (December, 2021) of the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Incidentally, I happened to meet John on my 40th birthday, in 2005 when I made the trip out to San Francisco to a science fiction and fantasy bookstore where he was doing a reading. I got an autographed John Shirley card from him that day, and he invited me to have dinner at a nearby fish taco style restaurant. Andrew Phillips was with me (I was visiting Andaru Grub on that trip, and staying at his place; this was not long before he consciously took his own life in the bathtub of his apartment in the most painless manner possible).
A year later, I paid the $350 or so fee to take a six-week creative writing online workshop with John Shirley in 2006. I learned some solid rudimentary nuts-and-bolts aspects of writing that have really helped me polish my style. Additionally, the things I've learned from publishing John's stories in the FREEZINE are measureless. My own writing has slowly been taking this natural evolutionary course streamlined by all the literary influences I've relished all my life. (There will come a day when very few left among us will say "no one does that anymore" when referring to the unique perspectives of talented creative writers like them. My personal aspiration as a poet is to beg to differ, even while in general agreeing with the sentiment.)
The other writer who's been a great inspiration to me and I can say I've corresponded with enough over the years that I feel a real bond of friendship with is the revelatory and lucid A. A. Attanasio. The written threads I've woven online with him over the years have really helped guide me toward sharing a scientific based outlook on this reality. Considering my heavy fascination with the writings of Philip K. Dick (which began in '82 when VALIS was published during the summer I turned 17) I can say that my strong cyberpunk undercurrent, coupled with having collected Creation Books in the 90s and having dovetailed my literary obsessions with Alan Moore's legacy, and augmented by reading a lot of K. W. Jeter's books, eventually led toward aligning my recent online energies with none other than Kenji Siratori, a truly enigmatic figurehead perpetually on the cusp of the evermorphing avante garde cyberscape of posthuman literary glitch deconstruction.
My intense ambivalence and tightrope-walker agility over the highest tension wired stylistic crevasses along this poetic journey have allowed me to reach previously inaccessible realms along this developing post-literary landscape. Long ago, Franz told me my poems were possessed of an inherent musicality, and so too have I more recently discovered that same pulsing melodic and lyrical beat remains inherent to John Shirley's writing; in fact, John told me the same thing, that a certain musical rhythm was inherent to my writing, so somewhere along the pathway of my development as a writer, I recognized that I'm one of those types where the writing itself matters more to me than whatever run-of-the-mill plot lines etc. define more typical or mainstream writing. This has been my number one challenge and struggle, as an aspiring author. It's hard getting a foot in the door when your writing leans too dangerously close to the experimental. On the other hand, I've already penned an inordinate amount of these stylistic writings, enough to gather them together into one volume thick enough to stun an ox, so it's just a matter of time before I release that tome under my own self publishing imprint, Plasma Press.
With the advent of the FREEZINE of Fantasy and Science Fiction, I've developed an underlying editorial thread into a futuristic narrative that's slowly cohering the further along I work on it. (That would be the reports from the bloodHost, which I'm writing piecemeal as The Nanochronicles, which continues to be serialized incrementally on my aforementioned science fiction webzine. Follow the hyperlinks above to catch up.
(to be cont.)
