Lock up the night-soil men who prowl our secret alleys and cart away our ripest fruit. Kleptomaniacs all, they do their dirty work on our dime. They eavesdrop on confidences exchanged with our BFFs. They sell us offal, call it Ovaltine, then assure us it's a small world after all. Bored with larceny, they muster…
Craft Notes: Dialogue
Paul West asserts that dialogue in fiction is for the eye, a way of offering the reader a bit of a rest now and then, and little more. I've been accused eschewing dialogue in my own work. But such readers might want to reconsider: could be all my work is composed of a dialogue, with…
Thoughts …
While my stubborn, or stupid, or philatelic nature won't allow me to give up, I am fairly reconciled to the reality that my chosen form of creative expression becomes, year after year, ever more an oddity--like an American cricket team, but with fewer enthusiasts.
Flicker in the Porthole Glass – Installment IX (conclusion)
My novel Flicker in the Porthole Glass was published by MAMMOTH Books in 2002. The Review of Contemporary Fiction observed that, "...the achievement here is Desautels’s prose, an aural event both jagged and elegant, assaultive and inviting, that moves with the clipped, dangerous, urgent kinesis of hard bop jazz." Seven years down the road, I'm…
Rockabilly Boogie
I first encountered it years ago when, rattling around the greasy alleyway flanking the belles lettres, I crashed in a bit beer woozy through a disused side door in zips, boots, jacket, chains, and an erratic psychobilly pompadour held together with NuNile pomade and Aqua Net spray (it’s true!). Though I hadn't yet the words…
Ed Desautels' Maximum Fiction 