A GIFT

A night of father and son bonding goes wrong -- very -- in my story "A Gift," published by the British journal, Fiction on the Web. Check it out.


On the way to town, Doug opened the pint of Maker's and took a hit, then passed it to Jim.

"Go on, boy. You're old enough."

Jim held the bottle like it was a dead rat.

"No Daddy, I -"

"Son, just try a little sip. Come on. We're celebrating."


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Washing Dishes, Writing Poems

I don't know about you, but when I wash dishes, my mind wanders. On a bad day, maybe I think about problems I can't solve. Do you have anything like that? Yes, yes. I know. On a better day, I think about problems that maybe I can solve. On the best days, I think about problems with stories or poems, problems that are fun to work with, even if there is no final untangling to their knots. This morning I was doing dishes and I thought for a while about how a book I've been reading to my children has a great scene that I might use as inspiration to jump start a novel I've been writing for longer than I care to admit. The scene is all about pursuit and danger and temporary rescue. I thought about that for a while and then, from nowhere, the first line of a poem came to me. I've learned not to ignore lines when they pop in from nowhere, so I sat down with pen and paper and a few minutes later I had this:


Conversation with a friend

She judged me for liking
the Byrds more than Dylan.

You know the type.

No?

Maybe that was what
I liked about her,
the certainty that
it even mattered.

If I say she radiated light,
will that make it more clear?

Jesus. What a cynic.
Haven't you ever been in love?

No?

Lucky you.

The thing is, I like Dylan.
Yes, even his voice.
Especially his voice.

Can you pass me that ashtray?
I want to give these things up
but it's so hard.

Look, we've known each other
for a long time. Can I tell
you something? It's just this:

I hold a thing in my heart
that no one sees,
an obvious, fundamental, thing
and I can't even say
what it is.

Isn't that crazy?

Laugh, if you want,
but I need answers:

Why are we invisible
when all we want
is to be
transparent?

Okay, fuck that.

Can I drink this beer?
It's the last one
but I'll buy more.

The girl?

I can't say she's gone
because she was never
here to begin with.

And you know?
The Byrds were a damned fine band.



So, that's the poem that came to me while I was washing dishes. Maybe it's okay, maybe it's not. But it feels good to get the words down. Always does.

Family Ties

Do you like madness? Murder? Parenting gone horribly wrong? If so, I hope you'll read my story, "Family Ties," online at Black Heart Magazine.


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I. The last time I was at these waters I nearly drowned. But that was years ago, when I was a boy. I’ve learned to stay on the right side of the fence and I stand here, safe, looking onto a shrinking horizon. The clouds are gathering in the distance, angry, gray, almost black. I can’t worry about that.

I am here for the lie.

Weddle Poetry on Internet Radio

On two separate occasions few years ago, I was fortunate enough to be a guest on the Jane Crown internet radio show. Both times I was on, Joe Milford guest hosted for Jane and we had a fine time.




The Great Joe Milford


The first time I was on, it was to talk about my book, Bohemian New Orleans. The second time, I got to read from my poetry. Some of what I read came from my collection, Betray the Invisible, which at that point had still not been published. I hadn't listened to the show in years, probably since it first aired -- or maybe never -- until today. Joe and I had a great conversation and he allowed me free reign not only to read my stuff, but to talk about it. I hope you'll give it a listen and I hope you'll like what you hear.


Joe, I owe you, buddy!


CLICK HERE TO HEAR THE SHOW.

Not Another Blonde Joke

(Stowe, Ohio: Implosion Press, 1991)

By Jeff Weddle

One fine day in 1990, I sat watching television in some cheap hotel room in Athens, Georgia with Paula Fountain and Jerry Williams. The three of us were on a road trip to visit universities where Paula and I were thinking of applying to Ph.D. programs in English. Jerry was still a couple of years from his BA at Morehead State University, but he was Paula’s boyfriend, so he came along for the ride. We had already been to Gainesville to see what Florida had to offer, and now we were checking out the University of Georgia.

We all thought of ourselves as poets and Paula, who published a fair amount in the little magazines around that time was a pure talent. Jerry had only recently fallen in with our crew--which pretty much meant Paula, me, Eric Cash, and Laura Caudill Cash, who may or may not have already been divorced by this point, but were still friendly. Jerry started writing poems when he started seeing Paula. Like the rest of us, he sent his stuff out to the magazines and, also like the rest of us, occasionally scored a publication.

We’d rolled into town an hour or so earlier and taken our turns in the shower and now were about to head to campus. The television was background noise while we got ourselves ready and I was about to turn it off when a commercial came on advertising Barbie dolls. I had seen this commercial, or ones like it, more times than I can name and thought nothing of it. Who knows why, this time, I was offended?

Like those commercials usually do, this one hawked Barbie in one of her many professional or adventure sets and something about that struck me as awful. Right then, Barbie stood for every bad cog in the American machine: racism, sexism, the exploitation of women, economic oppression, mindless consumerism. You name it. If it was a cultural horror, I blamed Barbie.



Was this fair? Who the hell knows and why do you care? What matters is this: When the commercial ended, I said to Paula and Jerry, “Why don’t they just sell an Anal Sex Barbie and get it over with?” I guess we all laughed about that. It’s funny, right? Am I right? Well, maybe you had to be there.

As I mentioned earlier, we fancied ourselves poets. That’s why the next thing I did was write this clever thing I’d said onto a scrap of paper, and right after that I wrote the first in a series of what, over the next couple of weeks, became twenty-five or so Barbie poems. This first one was a short little number and when I finished it I ditched Anal Sex in favor of Cornhole, which to my ear was a good deal funnier. I doubt that I spent more than five minutes composing the poem and sticking it in my pocket so we could head out and see what there was to see in Athens.

As anyone who has been there can attest, Athens is a coolio little town. We walked around campus, hit bars on the strip, generally had a blast. And the next day we drove back to Morehead.

So, I started sending my Barbie poems to the magazines. I don’t know how many I sent out, or where I sent them, but I do remember that I got a long, handwritten rejection from the editor at some hipper-than-though rag. He went out of his way to tell me that my poems were crummy, but that a friend of his was also writing Barbie poems, which were, of course, just fab. Well, okay then. Nice to know.

For some reason, I sent a big batch of Barbies to Cheryl Ann Townsend, proprietor of Impetus magazine and Implosion Press. Cheryl – everybody called her CAT, so that’s what we’ll do from here on out—ran a one-woman shop in Stowe, Ohio, publishing bleeding edge literature in beautiful, energetic formats. I’d sent CAT poems many times before and only once had she taken anything, a short poem slyly referencing masturbation, “Getting that Hair Sticky,” which she published in a special issue called Impetus Erotica. So, I knew CAT was particular about what she published and was not prepared for what happened next.



CAT saw merit in the poems, I guess, because she accepted ten of them and wrote that she would publish them together as a low-end chapbook. This made me happy happy happy. I had published dozens of poems in the little magazines, but never had I had my own, stand-alone publication.

Running a press all by your lonesome is an arduous task, and it took CAT a while to finish the project. In the meantime, I’d picked Ole Miss for graduate school and was sharing a busted up trailer in Oxford with Eric Cash. So, it was in Oxford that one day I went to pick up the mail and found a box from Implosion Press. It could only be one thing.

Getting that box was like the promise of sex. This was my first time with my own publication and I wanted to make it special. I didn’t have much money, but decided that the thing to do was take the box to a restaurant I liked and could afford and open it there. So, Long John Silvers, it was.

My fingers were greasy with fish when I opened the box and found a stack of very thin, very white booklets with the title, Not Another Blonde Joke: Poems from the mind of Jeff Weddle. CAT included what amounted to a brief biography on the copyright page: “Jeff Weddle lives in Mississippi. Maybe that explains these poems.”



Do I have to tell you that I was delighted with all of it? Overjoyed? Practically overcome? Well, I was.

I don’t know what became of most of the stack I found in that box. I still have one copy, and I believe that special collections at Yale and Brown Universities, for some reason, have their own.

Not so very long after Not Another Blonde Joke appeared, I got a call from Richard Peabody, telling me he was putting together Mondo Barbie for a major New York publisher, St. Martin’s Press. I guess Richard and CAT were friends and she, bless her, put him onto me. Before I hung up the phone, I remembered the snotty letter I received a few months back from the editor of that too-cool-for-school little mag and told Richard the name of the person who was supposedly writing the definitive Barbie poems. He thanked me and told me he would follow up. That person and I both had work accepted for Mondo Barbie and I remain proud of myself for passing the name along to Richard.

Mondo Barbie

Richard Peabody & Lucinda Ebersole, editors
(St. Martin's Press: 1993)

Back in 1992, I was living in a decrepit trailer in Oxford, Mississippi, with my buddy, Eric Cash. We were graduate students at Ole Miss, self-identifying poets,big time beer drinkers, and broke as hell. One day the phone rang and on the other end was a guy named Richard Peabody. Never heard of him. Oddly enough, however, he had heard of me. Turns out Richard was the respected editor of a top-flight literary magazine called Gargoyle. With fellow editor Lucinda Ebersole, he was putting together an anthology of poems and stories about Barbie for St. Martin's Press, and had heard through the grapevine that I might have a few that they should consider for the collection. The grapevine was Cheryl Ann Townsend, known in the literary small press world as CAT, who only a few months earlier had published, through her Implosion Press, a brief chapbook of my poems under the title, Not Another Blonde Joke, in which all manner of horrid things happened to poor Barbie. I don't know how CAT knew of Richard and Linda's project, but I'm forever grateful that she did and was gracious enough to recommend me to them.

Long story short, that very day I sent Richard the twenty-five or so Barbie poems I'd written and he soon chose two for the book. These were "Hell's Angels Barbie," and "Confederate Barbie." When it came out, Mondo Barbie was greeted with enthusiasm from such venerable places as the New York Times, the Village Voice, Kirkus Reviews, and more.

If memory serves, I was paid fifty dollars and a copy of the book, although that might be wrong. This was a long time ago, folks. And did I mention that I drank a lot of beer in those days?

One fine day, I got a package in the mail with Richard Peabody's return address. I tore open the mailer and soon held in my hands a most unusual book. Oh, how I loved it. The cover sported a lurid photo of what may have been a man in drag, wearing garish makeup and a couple of hair curlers. The pages were pink -- PINK! -- and untrimmed along the front edge. It didn't take long for me to discover that, in my copy at least, the page which held "Confederate Barbie" stuck out a bit from the rest of the text block. This meant that the book opened naturally to my poems for anyone who might casually flip through it. How cool was that? Very. Even more cool, Richard had sent along a photocopy of the New York Times's glowing review.

Being that I was pursuing a graduate degree in English, I took my copy to the department chair, whom I will not identify here. I handed him the book and the review and braced myself for praise and congratulations. Instead, he turned Mondo Barbie over in his hand a time or two and handed it back to me. His only comment? "I can't believe they reviewed this."

Well, pal, they did. And all these years later, the book is still in print and I'm still in love with it. That Barbie. What a doll.

This guy writes about Mondo Barbie.



As does this one.



And here's what Publisher's Weekly had to say.




This is what I looked like around the time of Mondo Barbie. I was thrilled beyond recognition to be included in what turned out to be a pretty significant book. The thrill remains.

The Outsiders of New Orleans: Loujon Press

The Outsiders of New Orleans: Loujon Press





Wayne Ewing Films, 2007; Jeff Weddle, Associate Producer

In the documentary The Outsiders of New Orleans: Loujon Press, Louise "Gypsy Lou" Webb, now well into her nineties, tells the story of how she and her husband Jon Webb published the avant-garde literary magazine The Outsider from a small apartment in the French Quarter in the early 1960's. By day Gypsy Lou sold paintings on a street corner, and by night she set the type that introduced the world to the beat poet Charles Bukowski whose work Jon Webb also chose for their first two Loujon Press books- It Catches My Heart In It's Hands and Crucifix in a Deathhand. The books are now rare collectibles, along with two others by Henry Miller, also hand-crafted and published by the Webbs. Gypsy Lou and Jon Webb's story is about their love for each other and their dream of publishing great literature. Such eccentricity emerged from the unique culture of the 1950's French Quarter where Tennessee Williams held court at the Bourbon House and Charles Bukowski came to drink with strangers while the Webbs labored in their apartment on Royal Street. The film's soundtrack features the legendary New Orleans jazz man Punch Miller who was one of the leaders of a musical revival in the 1960's with his trumpet at Preservation Hall. Punch also recorded Gypsy Lou Webb's song "Long Distance Blues" which is also featured in the film.