I’ve spent an enormous chunk of my life trying to escape society but somehow remain within society.

Family, friends, old jobs, and the medical field have all said to me at one time or another that I have mental issues because I feel that way. I don’t like attention, awards, or applause, that kind of attention has never been for me. I digress. When I was a drinking heavily, I enjoyed any kind of attention, but that was Henry and not Frank. Ever since I went on blood thinners in 2021, I had to painstakingly manage the world as Frank, rather than Henry. Henry raised beer mugs; got in fights; he was the comedian; he had a bunch of friends; flirted with women; at times he could be a complete asshole. Frank drinks a couple of beers, listens to his doctors, shows up for work, has less friends, and takes life a bit more seriously, but the one trait they both share is a mutual disliking of self-promotion. Especially when it comes to writing.

I’m not a fan of most kinds of literary attention, which is a double-edged sword because I like to publish, and I like it when people read my stories, poems, columns, and when I interview people. It humbles me. And not that people are banging down my door, but I have turned down a handful of podcasts and interviews in the past. I’m a nightmare for agents and publishers in the sense that I do not like self-promotion. I’ve tried to get better with it by sharing my work in Instagram stories, pinning stories on social media pages so people can read what I publish both in print and online because it sadly is a part of it. Shit, I even gave my first reading in years a few months back to the enormous and thunderous crowd of ten people. I’m quite certain a few of them had no idea who I was. I loved them more than the people who knew me, but, in a way, all of it makes me cringe. I think, in a way, I’m a naturalist. I prefer the work to speak for itself regardless of how many readers I may or may not have. Or due to being Gen X, I still believe in word of mouth. My brain is forever a telephone pole full of stapled fliers for rock bands, punk concerts, art classes, dog walkers, boxing classes, dominatrix sessions, and piano movers.

We live in an age where social media followers, likes, hearts, seem to be equally as important as the work itself, which bothers me. Imagine Jim Harrison, Carver, Bukowski, Highsmith, going on Facebook and posting their latest story. Imagine Jim Thompson taking to TikTok to promote ‘The Grifters.’ The work spoke for itself even when people didn’t really know them. Bukowski wrote, “She said I fucked better as a puncher of timeclocks, than I did as a writer.” I have that quote hanging in my writing area along with several others. I love that Buk quote because I know exactly what he meant by it.

Another thing that ruins me is that I don’t fit into a category, like the various kinds of books on my shelves, I enjoy writing different things. One day I’m working on a crime story, later a comical piece, or grit-lit, dirty realism, a literary story. I’ll wake up and write poetry, work on a column, or an interview. Years back, poets S.A. Griffin and Scott Wannberg told me, “The poem is always happening. It’s ongoing.” I apply that to my own writing. It never ends until the day I end. Everything is always ongoing. I like knowing I don’t know what’ll happen the next time I write. I like not knowing even though I do know. Woah, slow down there, Spicoli.

I’ve been nominated for Pushcarts, Best of The Net, the Harry Crews, and of course I never won. In fact, I often forget about the nominations two days later because I knew I wasn’t going to win, nor did I feel like I deserved to win. I don’t have a website for my writing, books, magazine publications, even if people have told me I need to get one immediately. I was the Larry Brown Writer in Residence for a week a few years back, which was a high point in my literary career if you can call it that. And not because of the invite, but because I was standing on the same holy ground that one of my heroes stood on. Still, I don’t like bragging about it, even if it feels to me like I’m bragging to you right now. When I talk about my time in Tula and Oxford I share photos, talk about meeting cool authors, hanging out with the lovely Brown family. I have no illusions about who I am. I’m not going to be a well-known reclusive author like Salinger or Cormac. My hope is when I publish people will read it and take something from it. My hope is to hang out with favorite authors because they liked stories or poems I published. My hope is to line my pockets with a few bucks. My hope is to wake up every day and write something, whether good or bad, just to simply string words together. Simple everyday ten-dollar words so I can communicate with everyday people like a nurse, butcher, electrician, a janitor, guitar player. I’m not of the intellectual crowd, nor do I come from it, nor do I intend to be a part of it.

I have little to no interest in panels or giving discussions, and I’ll never be a part of a workshop. However, I will sit and listen to a panel given by an author I dig. I’ve traveled, better yet, drifted across America from coast to coast in three different decades in the most broke ass way possible, and read more books than the average person, for me that’s workshop enough. I know, I’m odd right? But I end up sharing my stories in magazines not only do I want people to read them, but I believe in the magazine, the editors, and I want people to read the magazine as much as I want people to read my stories, and in a way it sucks for me. The moment I share a new publication, I look in the mirror and say, “There you go talking about yourself again.” I will admit, I do enjoy when people share my work online because it means they enjoyed it, and that means the world to me, but I have my dignity, and I will forever cuss myself out after I go online and compulsively post my publications. I’d rather talk about music, movies, boxing, sex, trees, hockey, a kitchen light switch in Wichita.

I’m also not much of a community person. I don’t do the whole “writing community” online. You’ll never see me using the hashtag ‘amwriting.’ I always thought posting that was funny, if one is hash tagging “amwriting” are they truly writing? This doesn’t mean I don’t believe in community, I do, but I prefer my place as the outsider looking in, like sitting on a park bench and people watching. I’ll certainly share books, stories, and poems from other writers I like. I’m even doing an interview series with Bull Fiction all of 2025 because it’s my way of giving back and turning people on to books from both big and Indie presses. However, I try to keep low key. The idea of telling people I work with, for example, that I’m a writer, gives me a serious case of the douche-chills. How pretentious of me, not to mention keeping myself on the down low allows me to listen in, get ideas. The only way for coworkers to find out that I write would be to find my social networks, Google my name, but I’ll never walk into a room and say, “hey man, I’m a fucking writer.” So fucking what? They can reply, “Hey man, I’m a street sweeper,” and they’ll win every single time. What can I say in return? “Well, I know what a noun is.” They’d laugh at me with an aching back and a fat paycheck from the city. I’ll go home kicking a can with a damn James Wright poem in my head and twelve cents in my bank account.

One author called me a fan, as to say I am not a writer but just a fan, like it was supposed to be this under-the-surface insult, like I’m not welcomed in the secret club. But It’s true, I am a fan of books. I adore novels, poetry, essays, from all kinds of backgrounds. I don’t stick to one area or type. I don’t only read Southern writers, Appalachian writers, Northwest authors, New York authors, and so on. If it’s a good story I don’t care where the fuck it takes place. I’m invested in the characters and what they do, much more than where they are from. Characters, emotions, feel, humor, and dialogue are my favorite things about books. It’s why I sit back for hours and read them. I really don’t care if you are from Hawaii, Maine, or Arizona, although interesting and one can learn a little about the place I still don’t care. I’m from Massachusetts, do you care? No, you do not.

Then there was the guy who said, “What do you know, you never published a book.” Well, in fact, I have published five books with cool publishers. According to that guy I suppose collections of poetry are no longer books. I didn’t turn to fiction until seven years ago, give or take, and I started writing all kinds of different stories. I still write all kinds of different stories. It’s why I have yet to publish a collection of stories because I am all over the place with the types of fiction I like to write. But have no fear, my adoring twenty fans, and would-be publishers, I have been putting together a collection of short stories I’ll have finished in 2025. I even read two of them at the reading I gave months back. One of them I read was released a week or so ago, ‘The Bullshit You Can Taste.”

Look at me go with that hard cock self-promotion.

I ask myself often, “Is it about the work?” Or “Is it about the applause?” When I choose the work, I tend to write the best stories I’ve ever written up to that point. If I pick applause, the story fizzles out and joins the ever-growing electric graveyard in my Gmail account. Awful stories banished to an electric corpse pile, begging for me to use them for spare parts in new stories. Never, ever, pick accolades over the work. Remain humble, fuck up those keys and bleed a while.

When I forget about publishing, social media publishing B.S., other authors, sharing, community, then I feel like I’m doing what I was meant to do which is sitting alone, music in my ears, coffee in hand, and typing words that become characters, maybe poems. That’s when I genuinely love the art, the process. When I’m alone I’m trying my hardest to communicate, writing the shit out of my system. Not in a cathartic self-help sense but more so trying to relate and give voice to the shit that’s in my head: words, voices, sounds, nightmares, anxiety, the goofy, loneliness, the sexual, depravity, obsessions, madness, hysteria, love. I write so I can find silence, even if for only a second. I do it because I’m trying to keep away from society, while still living within society.