"True Story!"

Next True Story: Friday, April 20th

2012-02-28T12:14:00.002-08:00

And it shall rule.

In the meantime, kick up your heels.

What to Expect at Lucky #13

2012-02-13T04:47:00.000-08:00

...True Story #13, that is...this Friday, Feb. 17th at Kavarna.

Damon SGRINOLI

from “Sensible Midwestern Vehicles”

My right is beginning to turn a slight pink from hours of resting it on the rim of the car’s windowsill. At my left, driving is my ex girlfriend. She steers the car down an eerily straight two-lane road in incremental “S” curves while the radio is tuned to a 90’s pop station, 101.9 The Heat. It’s churning out chart successes in a rapid pace. My ex seems to know the words to most, and does a fine job singing them. Her voice is better than I remembered.

I’m happy that the radio is up loud-too loud to speak and that the windows have remained open the entire time. The noise frees me from the need to say anything of substance.

I used to know her well. Shit, I used to know everything about her, what she liked—what she didn’t, but over the years we lost touch after she graduated from tech and up and moved to work at some Doctor’s office in Nashville. After that I let most of the good stuff slip away like a quick dream during an afternoon nap.

A song blares from the overexerted, assembly line speakers. I look in her direction. She tilts her head back, allowing the Midwest air to make floating chaos of her caramel strands.

During the chorus she flirts with me by jabbing her slender finger into my thigh each time it repeats, “If you want to be my baby, go ahead now”. I return a stiff, guarded smile.

I was leery about seeing her again. I guess most people in my circumstance would be. It wasn’t until last week on the phone that I’d heard from her in years. It wasn’t until out of the blue, she asked me to accompany her on this trip.

Lain SHAKESPEARE

Street names honor many of our citizens long after their memories have faded. That’s the point. The patina of history, however, has allowed City Council to play favorites with well-connected contemporaries. No matter what Councilmembers might think, Atlanta’s history isn’t comprised of fictional characters that should be discarded in favor of friendship or politics.

John Harris was a man with a family who served our city, our county, and our state. No doubt he and his family took pride in their name, both before and after we named a street after him.

Harris’s cousin was one of Atlanta’s most famous citizens, Joel Chandler Harris, an associate editor of the Atlanta Constitution alongside Henry Grady. I can’t imagine he’d be thrilled if our City Council stripped his family of its honor for no particular reason.

The same goes for Joe Harris’s son, Julian Harris, a prominent Atlantan who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1926 for his “energetic fight against the Ku Klux Klan.” He in particular wouldn’t hide his displeasure with our City Council for stripping his family of its honor for no particular reason.

So too his great-grandnephew, Robin Harris, who as a State Legislator was instrumental in developing MARTA and Georgia’s current Constitution. He wouldn’t be happy about the $100,000 our cash-strapped transit agency will needlessly incur by having to change its maps and signage from “Harris Street” to “John Portman Boulevard at Historic Harris Street.”

Robin Harris’s grandson, yours truly, isn’t exactly thrilled about it either. Honor meant to outlast memory shouldn’t be stripped once someone’s contributions are forgotten.

City Council President Mitchell has said that naming a street after a citizen is “the highest honor a city can bestow.” If that’s true, we can’t leave City Council to pit the merits of great Atlantans against one another and thus erode that honor’s credibility, one street renaming after the next."

Stacey Beth SHULMAN

from "That's a Body Part!"

My second job after grad school was at Georgia Baptist Medical Center, just across the highway from Grady. When I was born there, it was called Georgia Baptist Hospital. If you are a more recent transplant, you’ll probably know this as Atlanta Medical Center.

Between spending time wandering the halls trying to have a birth memory, I was actually employed as a therapist in the rehabilitation department. It was a pretty fun job, as far as jobs go. I got to help people recovering from brain injuries and strokes connect the dots from their past to the present.

It was there I discovered how much I love the human brain and all of the mysterious things it is capable of. One of my patients, an older lady with a gentle, demure demeanor, had suffered a stroke that left her with a rather flat affect. She was in rehab to learn how to communicate again with words and, the treatment team hoped, to get a bit of her personality back. We figured out that while speaking was nearly impossible for her after her illness, singing was very easy.

So we taught her to sing her words.

So far, she was able to manage one or two syllables, but conversation was still far off. My job was to help her access the part of her brain that generated the words. I would tell her to do things like “Name a fruit”, to which she would respond in a soft, sing-song voice, “apple,” or ask her questions like “What do you wear on your head?” and she would say “a hat” in that same sing-song cadence.

Then there was the time I asked her to name a body part.

“Vagina,” she said, rather melodiously.

At that instance, our eyes met, both wide in shock. It was obvious that this was not the response that either of us expected. My patient smiled and with a sparkle in her eye and an impish grin I had never seen before, she said in her sing-song way, “That’s a body part!”

Yes, the brain is capable of some mysterious things.

MORE-! on our Friday, Feb. 17th Readers

2012-02-08T05:43:00.001-08:00

Damon SGRINOLI-!

Damon Sgrignoli lives and writes in Atlanta. His work has been featured in Spin, Stone and Paste Magazines, among others. He is currently looking for an agent for his first novel.

Lain SHAKESPEARE-!

Lain Shakespeare is a native of Decatur, Georgia. He attended Kenyon College. Lain served as executive director of the Wren's Nest for five years. His grandmother grew up three houses down from Kavarna. He dislikes peanut butter.

Stacey Beth SHULMAN-!

Stacey Beth Shulman is a native of Atlanta, even if her accent doesn’t always sound like it. An active participant in the Carapace/Atlanta Moth Up events, she has told stories for Creative Loafing, The Museum of Design Atlanta, and The Southern Order of Storytellers. Stacey is not just a raconteur on stage. As a yoga teacher and yoga therapist, she helps people discover the stories held within their body. When she is not on the mat, she enjoys painting, bird watching, spending time with her partner of 12 years, and playing with their cat, Spike, who only gets mildly annoyed.

Looking forward to seeing you as these three rock the stage at "Lucky" True Story #13.

Next Reading--Fri. Feb. 17th

2012-01-23T05:03:00.000-08:00

Hey there, 2012. How's it going?

New batch of rogue writers and nervy journalists for ya, beginning Friday, February 17th--8:00 pm at Kavarna in Decatur.
Dig-!

Damon Sgrinoli of Paste Magazine fame
Lain Shakespeare of Wren's Nest fame
Stacey Beth Shulman of Carapace and reali-TEA storytelling fame

Stay tuned.

Thanks to all who came out for the last reading of 2011...See ya in February.

2011-12-16T05:39:00.001-08:00

(Low whistle.)
Another thanks to Thomas Wheatley, Justin Heckert, John Jeremiah Sullivan, and all of you who came out, for kicking it at True Story #12.

More artifacts and stories comin' your way Friday, February 17th.

Here's the lineup:
Damon Sgrignoli
Stacey Beth Shulman
Lain Shakespeare

Yes, yes, and yes.

See ya then.

Love,
TS

"True Story" Rocks it This Friday....Atlanta Mag Gives Shout-out

2011-12-04T08:18:00.000-08:00

Rah-rah, ATL Write Scene!

A piece in this month's Atlanta Magazine recognizes Write Club, Carapace, Kill Your Darlings, the Wren's Nest, and (gasp,) all the other lit-tastic happenings around the city--including True Story. Hurrah!

What a lurvely Christmas present.

We'll see you Friday, right?

That's when Thomas Wheatley, Justin Heckert and John Jeremiah Sullivan will kill it. We can pretty much guarantee a bang-up time: about as much fun for absolutely free on a Friday night as you've ever had, at least since the last time you were doing dishes and held that impromptu dance party all by yourself....or maybe just since the last True Story. We can't be the judge of everything.

Anyway: 8:00, Kavarna. See you there.

True Story #12: We can't promise a dance party won't break out.

True Story #12 Readers: Where You've Seen 'Em Before

2011-11-14T04:56:00.000-08:00

At the intersection of nervy journalism and rogue writing.
Friday, December 9th.
8:00 pm.
Kavarna.
Dig.

John Jeremiah SULLIVAN
He is a memoirist (Blood Horses), award winning writer (GQ, NY Times Magazine, etc), and an editor for the Paris Review. He also writes for Harper's Magazine and the Oxford American. His work in those publications has twice been given the National Magazine Award (for best feature and best essay, respectively). He has also received a Whiting Writers' Award and a Pushcart Prize. Sullivan is the author of Blood Horses (FSG, 2004) and Pulphead (FSG, 2011). He lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Read the Publishers Weekly starred review of Pulphead here: www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-374-53290-1

From "You Blow My Mind. Hey, Mickey!” The New York Times:
Something you learn rearing kids in this young millennium is that the word “Disney” works as a verb. As in, “Do you Disney?” Or, “Are we Disneying this year?” Technically a person could use the terms in speaking about the original Disneyland, in California, but this would be an anomalous usage. One goes to Disneyland and has a great time there, probably — I’ve never been — but one Disneys at the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. There’s an implication of surrender to something enormous.

One night my wife, M. J., said I should prepare to Disney. It wasn’t presented as a question or even as something to waste time thinking about, just to brace for, because it was happening.

Justin HECKERT
Justin Heckert lives in Decatur, Ga., with his wife, Amanda, and their dog, Cooper. His work has been published in Atlanta magazine, Esquire, ESPN The Magazine, Men's Journal, the Oxford American, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, among others. In 2005 he was named Writer of the Year by the City and Regional Magazine Association. Some of his work has been anthologized in the Best American Crime Reporting and noted in the Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best American Essays and Best American Sports Writing.

From “And In The End,” Atlanta magazine:
The man’s chest was completely open after a few moments, the layer of his upper chest folded to tickle his nose. Then, beneath the fat, the organs. Organs upon organs in the gorge of the open body, stacked and miraculously fit together, delicate as rose petals. When looking inside of a cut-open body, during an autopsy, one cannot help but get a sense of wonder. The human body is a miracle. The lungs and heart and kidneys are a miracle. The intestines, how they stretch and bend, what they can hold, how they function, the sheer length of them—miracles. That blood can flow through a maze of veins thinner than mechanical-pencil lead is nothing less than a miracle.

Thomas WHEATLEY
An Atlanta native who spent nearly 12 lost years in the suburban wilderness, Thomas is an award-winning staff writer at Creative Loafing, Atlanta's alt-weekly, who covers transportation, the environment, urban development and state and local politics. A graduate of the University of Georgia and former New Yorker, he enjoys crossword puzzles and C-SPAN. He has an intense fear of spiders, clowns and old black-and-white movies in which men court women. Prior to joining CL, he was a staff writer at a weekly newspaper in north Fulton County and a contributing writer at Flagpole, Athens, Ga.’s altweekly, where he wrote about pigeon racers, nudist resorts and mountain town professional wrestling organizations. He lives in Decatur with his wife and two cats.

From “Sober,” Creative Loafing:
On Thanksgiving Day in 2006, I was alone in the bathroom of my Tahitian lagoon bungalow, shaking and vomiting blood. Outside, a lushly tropical island jutted up from the water and topless newlywed brides sunbathed on the decks. But in my all-expenses paid room – courtesy of a contest I'd won on "Live With Regis and Kelly" – the shades were drawn. I looked in the mirror and told myself to stop drinking, yet kept washing my mouth out with vodka. I hadn't eaten anything of substance in two days. I was doing exactly what I promised myself time after time I wouldn't do again.

I spent seven days puddle jumping to different islands in Tahiti, and I can tell you more about my hotel room than I can about the archipelago. My ritual consisted of cleaning out the mini-bar, ordering room service or making my way inland to pick up food that was easy on my stomach – bread, butter, crackers. More importantly, I'd buy two bottles of vodka so I wouldn't have to return to the store the next day. Even though the mini-bar and room service were only footsteps or a phone call away, I wanted options. When I went on my sole excursion – a jet-skiing trip around Bora Bora – the tour guide took a look at me and asked if I'd been partying the night before. No. I was just a guy who'd stayed up all night in his room drinking vodka.

Unlike Christmas, True Story #12 Actually Is Right Around the Corner

2011-11-09T05:01:00.000-08:00

Hey!

So, we'll see you Friday, December 9th at 8:00 pm at Kavarna, right?

Good.

Because this True Story's gonna be the best one ever.

(Because, let's face it, each new True Story always seems the best one ever.)

And we would not want you to miss it.

You want true tales ? You want rogue writers? You want nervy journalists?

The True Story stage has it all, in the misleadingly mortal forms of...

Justin HECKERT!

Thomas WHEATLEY!

John Jeremiah SULLIVAN!

Mark your calendar and stay tuned for more info.

This Friday's Readers. Enchanting Excerpts!

2011-10-17T18:13:00.000-07:00

Some terrific true tale-telling expected this Friday at Kavarna...It might go a little something like this:

Krista DERBECKER

from “A Tribute to True Love”

There is nothing sexy about a fast-food drive in. But the neighborhood A&W in Waterloo, Canada is where my parents first met the summer my mom turned fifteen. My dad was two years older and pulled up in a car crammed full of his buddies, and my mom, red hair aflame, brown uniform pulled tight around her tiny waist, came out to take their order. For my dad, it was love at first sight, if you believe in that kind of thing. A few weeks after the A&W meeting my dad was at a party, playing pool, when my mom walked down the stairs into the smoky basement with some girlfriends. As my mom tells it, she saw my dad, clad in a jean jacket with a popped collar, cigarette hanging out of his lips, leaning over the pool table to take a shot. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. When my dad looked up and noticed the girl from the restaurant, he turned to friend next to him.

“See that girl?” he asked, nodding his head toward my mom. “I’m gonna marry

her.”

His friend shook his head and laughed. “Bullshit.”

“You wanna bet?” My dad asked, full of swagger, completely smitten, and probably high.

So they shook on it. Five years later the friend owed my dad one hundred dollars as my dad made good on his word and married my mom.

I was raised on this 1970s fairy tale. My parents would tell it to me while they tucked me in at night, pulling the covers up to my chin and setting a glass of water on my white wooden nightstand. My youngest girlhood dreams were of being fifteen and meeting my soul mate. By the time I hit high school I had never even kissed a boy, but so strongly did I believe my parents’ story, and its prophecy for my own romance, I was practically expecting to be engaged before graduation.

My parents had no idea how much they were leading me on with these pretty little stories. Throughout my adolescence, I believed that my underage soul mate search would prove fruitful. I pictured the same happy ending of wedding bells with the handful of guys I dated. Those poor boys. They were looking for a date to the movies or a quick make-out session at my front door before curfew. I was sizing them up to see if they were the one.

Shannon MCNEAL

One year out of law school Shannon McNeal landed a job in Columbus, Mississippi. It was a small operation - a lawyer, his secretary, and her...

On the first day I arrived I was sent to the courthouse to try a case without the file. The secretary found and it brought it up to the courthouse about the time the jury was seated. I had never seen the client and knew nothing about the case. I learned a valuable lesson that day. Don't let your client out of your sight during trial. He came back drunk. I also learned never to let my boss try a case. I insisted that he take over the case that afternoon and between his bad lawyering and the drunk client, well, we lost the case.

About three months into the gig in Columbus a man came into the office and told me he was trying to pay child support and see his child. When I asked him the last time he had seen the child he handed me a sonogram. Almost exactly three years later, he finally had his child and I had learned a lot about human nature and the practice of law.

Jason MYERS

In the truck stop where you purchase a Sierra Mist (owned by PepsiCo, which saw a dramatic rise in its business in the 1940s when it began marketing its products to African Americans, at the time prohibited from drinking Pepsi at the same counter as Americans of European descent,) before walking a few hundred yards to stand across the street from Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison (which lists as its mission, “Ensure public safety and effectively house offenders while operating a safe and secure facility. Also conduct diagnostic processing for offenders, houses offenders under death sentence [UDS] and carry out state ordered executions. In addition, we offer a Special Management Program,” and also features a tab on its website that allows viewers to ‘like’ or ‘follow’ the prison on Facebook and a variety of other social networking sites) where, at 7 pm on Wednesday, September 21st, Anno Domini 2011 the state of Georgia, the last of the original Thirteen Colonies as well as the last state to be restored to the Union – following the Civil War, or the War of Northern Aggression as its often referred to in these parts – on July 15th, 1870, was scheduled to execute Troy Anthony Davis (execute is too bland and benign a word, more appropriate for paperwork or a gymnastic routine; they were going to kill him, murder him) you notice the white men sitting at the bar of the restaurant that must specialize in meatloaf and ice-box pie as they gaze up at a television set tuned to FoxNews and watch a black man (he is more tan or beige, because see, he is half white) who is the President of the United States of America address the United Nations regarding statehood for Palestine, that geographic region well-known from the Bible that has been inhabited for centuries by Jews, Christians, and Muslims though FoxNews wants these men to believe it is simply Arab (read Muslim, read terrorist) and you wonder how much Barack Hussein Obama II, whose father was Kenyan and whose mother was Kansan (they met in a Russian language class on the island of Hawaii), has followed the story of Troy Davis[.]

See you Friday at 8:00. We can't wait either.

Friday, October 21st Readers Announced!

2011-10-07T05:38:00.000-07:00

Do we have some rogue writers lined up for True Story #11 or what?

The answer is, yes.

See here.

Krista DERBECKER

Krista hails from Ontario, Canada, but has spent enough years in Georgia to consider herself a bona fide Southerner. She graduated from the University of Georgia with degrees in Journalism and Spanish, but please don’t ask her to translate anything as she seems to have only retained how to ask for directions and order more cheese dip.

She has written for Skirt! Magazine, The Atlantan and Creative Loafing, but soon after college, fell in love with Little Shop of Stories, a children’s bookstore in downtown Decatur where she works as the store manager. When she isn’t at the bookstore reading at weekly storytimes, organizing community Christmas tree lightings, and reminding people that the cute little bookstore in You’ve Got Mail went out of business, so please don’t say Little Shop is “exactly like that movie,” Krista holes up in her house to work on her book, The Patron Saint of Doubt, a collection of nonfiction essays about faith, family, and figuring out life.

Shannon MCNEAL

Shannon McNeal grew up listening to her grandfather, J.B. Cochran, telling tales about their family in Mobile County, Alabama. She inherited his talent for spinning tragedy into comedy and loves to share her stories about growing up in Alabama and her adventures after moving to Atlanta. If you love southern porch stories, you will love Shannon McNeal.

Shannon was born in lower Alabama, or as she likes to affectionately call it, LA. After the two yet-to-be explained years living in Ohio, her family moved back to Alabama, this time to the northern section of LA. Shannon was sent off to college before graduating high school, so to this day, technically, she is a high-school drop out.

Shannon graduated from Georgia State University with a degree in philosophy and a couple years later went off to Mississippi to study law so she could earn a living. Now back in the Atlanta metro area, she is having the time of her life telling stories.

Jason MYERS

Jason Myers does not mess. He grew up in Hagerstown. Where? It's about an hour west of D.C. and Baltimore. He's been trying to live Somewhere ever since. Bennington, New York (Brooklyn), Wilmington (no, not Delaware), and Atlanta. His writing has been published in Agni, American Poet, The Paris Review, Tin House, and several other journals. He is a Master of Divinity Student at Emory University, and a National Poetry Series finalist.

True tales. Strange artifacts From the Past. Friday, October 21st at 8:00 pm at Kavarna. See you there.

Just announced! John Jeremiah Sullivan to Take the "True Story!" Stage in December!

2011-09-15T05:44:00.000-07:00

Hey! Isn't that John Jeremiah Sullivan, who wrote that incredible article that I emailed to everyone I know and some people I don't know?

A fierce fall and wicked winter approaches in True Storyland, folks. Our October 21st reading includes memoir'y-prose from Krista Derbecker, storytelling from raconteur Shannon McNeal (of Carapace, and well...Shannon McNeal fame,) and wordsmith'y prose from poet Jason Myers.

And then there's December--
--when, we're really downright psyched to announce: one of our favorite writers walking the streets of this nation today is traveling to Atlanta to take the "True Story!" stage: John Jeremiah Sullivan.

If you don't know Sullivan, here's a sampling of his work--just so you'll know to clear you calendar on Friday, Dec. 9th and get to Kavarna.

There's "Upon this Rock," his celebrated essay in GQ a few years back--about covering a Christian rock festival.

Recently, he wrote this piece for the New York Times about what happens when family, your stoner friend and the latter-day phenomenon known as "Disneying" collide.

More: A story about Gulfport, MS, just after Hurricane Katrina, and shorter pieces on Leonard Cohen and Kurt Cobain in the New York Magazine.

He recently won a Pushcart Prize for his essay "Mister Lytle," published in The Paris Review.

And, is this appropriate to say?, we've also see John read before, and it's incredibly worthwhile. Furthermore, we've also actually spent the past ten minutes arguing among ourselves about whether or not it's appropriate to add in the additional fact that he's a really swell dude.

So obviously, you have to be there, fool. We think John will be reading from his new book of collected essays, and you may be able to buy one that night.

Meanwhile, see ya in October. We can't wait.

Artifact #5: Letter from the Kibbutz

2011-09-11T09:39:00.000-07:00

Letter from the Kibbutz: An Artifact from Mickey Dubrow
I wouldn’t go so far as saying I was Jeff’s sidekick. A more accurate description would be to say that I was the Mr. Spock to his Captain Kirk. The Trapper John to his Hawkeye. The Lacey to his Cagney. He was the instigator. I was the willing partner in crime.

We first became friends in kindergarten. We lived in the same neighborhood. Over the years, he would drift away from time to time because he decided that I wasn’t cool enough to hang with him. But then, we’d run into each other at the mall or at a neighbor’s house and the friendship would pick up again as if we hadn’t missed a day.

When we were in our late teens, Jeff spent a year on a kibbutz. It wasn’t his choice to go to Israel and have this experience. His mother made him go because she desperately needed a break from the trouble he caused.

I never asked Jeff to write me while he was in Israel. He decided that on his own. I loved getting his letters, and not just because he had an amusing outlook on life. He wrote about three main topics: the hot weather, having to smoke hash instead of pot, and who he saw in concert. But now, Jeff was reaching out to me instead of the other way around. The letters meant that he valued our friendship as much as I did.

I particularly enjoyed this letter because Jeff had heard that I was feeling depressed and suicidal. He wanted to try and make me feel better. I didn’t stop feeling suicidal. I had to work that out on my own. But his letter did make me feel much better.

Mickey Dubrow read at True Story #4 in April 2010. To share an artifact of your own and the story that goes with it, send it to truestoryga(at)gmail(dot)com.

Artifact #4: Teddy's Dreams

2011-08-27T09:52:00.000-07:00

Teddy's Dreams: An Artifact from Jack Walsh

My first attempt at storytelling was a series of books (I called them books at the time; they are, at most, five pages long) called Teddy's Dreams. And they feature Teddy, who is either a teddy bear or a real bear. I don't remember which.

I think these date from when I was about five and a half. I would draw the pictures and then dictate accompanying text to my Mom, who wrote it in crayon. My 93-year-old grandmother was looking at these recently and said, "You had such good handwriting when you were a child."

In most of these, Teddy is doing something fairly exciting or adventurous or interesting. In the accompanying images we see him galloping in on a periwinkle horse (I remember being very taken with the periwinkle crayon for a while) to rescue a captive princess. Then he does some football stuff with the football (this was the depth of my understanding of the sport then; it is marginally deeper now) and goes for a ride on his shiny new moped (presumably, Teddy was not a drunk who had lost his license, which was frequently the safe assumption in rural Appalachia). This book ends with Teddy kicking back to eat some honey. It should be noted that every book ends with Teddy eating honey. I'm not sure if this was intended to be Teddy's ultimate dream or, rather, Teddy's ongoing reality.

Looking at these now, it seems Teddy's Dreams was perhaps a means for me to work out my future "when I grow up" aspirations with Teddy as my on-page proxy. The most obvious and little-boy-stereotypical are Teddy as policeman, firefighter, and army helicopter pilot. There are some where the appeal seems less obvious, most notably Teddy working a cash register under the caption "Teddy the Grocery Bear."

The attention paid to some details over others is interesting. “Teddy Doing Arithmetic” is mostly an ill-defined blob of brown, but despite the laziness of the color palette, I nevertheless took the time to include not only a cutaway of Teddy working out 2 + 2 but also a wall-mounted portrait of Teddy’s blonde bear girlfriend.

While almost every page of Teddy's Dreams is a stand-alone tableau, there is an exception. In one book, set mostly on a raft at sea, I experimented with an actual linear narrative that went like this:

Page 1: Teddy is seasick.

Page 2: Teddy is more seasick

Page 3: Teddy is most seasick.

Page 4: Teddy is well and at Adventure-Land.

Page 5: Teddy eating honey.

That ending practically wrote itself.

Jack Walsh read at "True Story!" #7 in December 2010. Want to share an artifact of your own and the story that goes with it? Send it to truestoryga(at)gmail(dot)com.

Three Reasons to Come Out to “True Story!” #10, Friday 8/19

2011-08-12T11:41:00.000-07:00

1. Dames

2. Death

3. Cake.

Maybe not in that order.

Also, we've missed you and can't wait to tell you so in person as we preview the rest of our bang-up 2011 season, dish about some artifacts from ours readers' past, and talk about how you can share yours.

Need more? Here are Excerpts from Our Three Readers.

1. Candice Dyer

In a move that combines burlesque with recycling, Blondie Strange crushes Budweiser empties flatter than platters between her breasts without flinching, dismounts the stage, and pulls a Sharpie from behind the bar to autograph them for the hooting frat boys, intown scenesters, and gamy night crawlers who are waving dollar bills. Most of the unconventional sirens of the Clermont Lounge strut some trademark gimmick, tic, distinguishing tattoo, or cesarean scar, but Blondie’s trick—a gesture of unbowed, Hellzapoppin’-style showmanship that yields a lasting and curious souvenir for fans—has established her as the most famous stripper in a city renowned for its adult entertainment.

“I only work with Budweiser and PBR cans,” she says, referring to the brands of choice in this sticky, threadbare Ponce de Leon landmark that adamantly refuses to pour microbrew drafts into frosted mugs. (Pity the suburbanite who orders one.)

2. Kate Sweeney

We homo sapiens like the idea of somehow endowing one’s temporary stay on this earth with permanence in death, even if that permanence means a resting place where the living person couldn’t have survived for five minutes in life, a place ten miles out to sea and 50 feet below it. And hence, we have Eternal Reefs’ artificial coral reef.

The morning of the launch, there’s this tamped-down sense of thrill in the air, that sort brought on by novelty. The hulking objects of this fascination sit crouched in a neat line, waiting to be harnessed and lifted aboard. Each artificial coral reef contains the cremated remains of one person—or, in one case today, those of a cat, a tabby named named Mistofeles. Each reef resembles a circular footrest, a footrest that is hollow and sort of bell-shaped, two to four feet tall, and just as wide. Each is peppered, swiss-cheeselike, with holes, and reminds me in appearance of nothing so much as the trick-or-treater in the Charlie Brown Halloween Special who dressed as a ghost—but cut too many eyeholes in his sheet.

3. Joseph Morgan

I began by pulling the bodies out and pushing them both up to large metal drain sinks. As I stared at these lifeless forms, with whom only a few days earlier I had been drinking beer and eating hotdogs, the door opened and in came the pathologist. I assume that my gaze and posture did not escape the notice of the pathologist who without greeting said, “Are you ready for this?” Eighteen years after the fact, I wish I had said “no I am not” and turned and ran from that place, but my feet were as heavy as boat anchors. The pathologist said, “Get some towels and cover their faces.”

This is in the days before “universal precautions” were of paramount concern. There I stood with my green scrubs on and the only barriers between me and the bodies were my gloves and a white plastic apron. As I went about my task the blood of my friends leeched onto my bare, exposed arms. Their blood speckled my face. I tasted him in my mouth. As I used my Stryker saw to open Lance’s head, the smell of the histamine the high speed saw created entered my nostrils. I wept as I breathed in the essence of my friend.

After I finished, I turned, grabbed my Marlboros and went outside to smoke and cry. Pathetically I sat on the steps of the morgue crying like a victim of a prison gang rape. Pain. In the practice of death investigation it is never a good idea to allow any of your colleagues see you get emotional; you become labeled a head case and trust evaporates.

Artifact #3: I Faked my Name.

2011-08-04T07:07:00.000-07:00

(Good g-d that's such a little kid in that picture! )

I Faked my Name: An Artifact from Jessica Handler

Okay, I’ll own up at the get-go. I worked in the Dream Factory – Hollywood. I wasn’t a celebrity, or a celebrity-hanger on, or a rarefied director or producer. The closest I usually got to celebrities, other than next in line at the Irvine Ranch Market at the Beverly Center, was at work, shepherding a member of that rarified society from the green room – a holding pen with a cheese tray and iced diet sodas - into the hallway, where an assistant director took over, herding them the next few yards to the stage. This activity was always timed so the house band could vamp a glossy riff on a celeb’s theme song.

There’s a show-biz term for people who aren’t celebrities; “civilians.” As a civilian, I worked backstage on a talk show. Before I worked on the talk show, I worked backstage for a game show, a land where success was measured in on-camera joyous tears.

But this was the eighties, so even civilians dressed like stars. We all tried to have very big hair. We squeezed ourselves into extremely tight pants, and wore jackets with shoulder pads resembling family-sized loaves of bread. I freshened my swaths of dark red lipstick on the hour, until a make-up artist (who had been a child star – another true confession) told me that if I put talcum powder on my lips first, “like the French,” my lipstick would stay on all day. I don’t know if this is the French method, but it worked.

Despite the grueling hours I spent steering celebrities through basement hallways, and decimating forest acreage by extreme quantities of script photocopying, I occasionally got time off. And it’s on one of these days off that I deliberately misrepresented myself to an innocent little kid.

On that Sunday, I met a friend for brunch at a restaurant in Malibu. She picked the place; the kind of restaurant with the faux-casual patio seating offering warm Pacific breezes and a cinematic cliff-side view, or for the less fortunate, a wall of picture windows.

I drove out to Malibu in my half-dead car. My car was the color of my lipstick, except for the speckles of Bond-o. My spiky hair was sturdily gelled, my lipstick impermeable.

I shelled out for valet parking at the restaurant. I was feeling flush. My friend got a table with a view of the ocean, and the California sunshine guaranteed flattering lighting. We had a wonderful time. After we’d worked our way through bagels, lox, eggs, an opulent fruit salad you can only get in California, and more than a few Bloody Marys, I started to have that creepy feeling you get when someone’s watching you.

At first, I resisted the urge to look around and find the starer. Instead, I paid closer attention to my friend’s gossip about college pals. Behind me, the staring grew more intense. A magnetic force emanated from the middle of the restaurant. My friend’s voice faded into the general hum of the room, and I found I couldn’t resist the pull of the stare. I gave in. I turned, prepared to meet my very own paparazzi.

It was a kid - a little boy maybe ten years old. Sweet faced, blonde, dressed in a button-down shirt and jeans. And holding out a smudgy paper napkin and a ballpoint pen.

“Uh, hi?” I said.

The boy smiled at me, awkwardly, and extended the pen and napkin closer to me. He shifted from foot to foot, and smiled harder. Smiling would make me do something.

Despite the paper and pen, I had no idea what he wanted.

I looked past him, searching for clues from the other diners. No one noticed us, until I saw a middle-aged couple at a table a few feet away. The man waved, that wiggly finger shy wave. The woman beamed, and made a gentle shoving motion toward her little boy. Shoo. G’wan. This was a family of tourists. I could tell because Mom wore an appliquéd sweatshirt.

Beside me, the boy cleared his throat, or tried to. He made sort of a squeaking sound.

“Glurk?” he asked.

“Huh?” I replied.

“Can I have your autograph?” the boy said.

He was gaining confidence, probably because I proved to be slower on the uptake than he had predicted. He pushed the pen and napkin toward me one more time.

I froze. This kid – and his parents – thought I was someone famous. Someone whose autograph on a crappy paper napkin from a breakfast place in Malibu they would treasure forever. Across the table, my friend, stifling a laugh, choked on her Bloody Mary. At my side, the little boy beamed at me. Across the room, his parents beamed at him.

And I did a terrible thing. I smiled back, and I reached for his napkin and pen.

“Sure!” I said.

What I wanted to say, what I should have done, was ask him, “Who am I?” Or I could have disguised my deceit and framed a leading question like, “Which of my movies is your favorite?” That way I could get a clue about who I was supposed to be. But what if movies were wrong, and he thought I was a TV star? Or a rock star?

What if he thought I was someone I didn’t actually like?

For as long as I’ve been old enough to hold a pen or pencil, I’ve been known for having really terrible handwriting. It’s a scrawl, unrecognizable in any language. I can’t read my own handwriting. So I went all out. I signed his paper napkin in the most deliberately awful loops and dashes I could muster. And I handed it back to him, and smiled.

He took the autograph, examined it – and gazed up at me with love in his eyes.

“Thank you so much!” he whispered, and scampered back to his parents.

Here’s the confession. I feel terrible about this. I wondered then, and I still wonder, which celebrity he thought – he was sure – he met that day. He met someone whose identity existed only in his eyes; a woman whose very bad handwriting, curved and thick as her lipstick, obscured her true identity.

That little boy must be grown by now, perhaps with kids of his own. I hope that on his way to being an adult he was once briefly presumed to be someone he wasn’t. I hope that on that occasion he went along with it, and that he forgives me.

I hope, too, that he managed to sell my panicky and elaborate autograph online or at a fan fair. True confession? I hope he got a good price for it.

Jessica Handler read at "True Story!" #1 in October 2009.

The next "True Story!" reading is Friday, August 19th, 8:00 p. at Kavarna in Decatur.

Artifact #2: The Jetsetter

2011-07-28T15:13:00.000-07:00

The Jetsetter: An Artifact from Kay Powell

There's something about other people's diaries.

Before she was the former renowned "Doyenne of the Death Beat," Kay Powell was a jetsetting journalist. She generously shares three rather juicy pages of a personal journal she kept on one international trip in the 1970s.

Kay read these aloud at "True Story!" #2 in Dec. 2009.

To submit a photograph of your own personal artifact, write truestoryga (at) gmail dot com. Include a note of explanation if necessary.

Artifact #1: The Key

2011-07-24T11:06:00.000-07:00

The Key: An Artifact from Randy Osborne

I was six years old when my parents split up. Dad disappeared, and my mother took a full-time secretarial job. She sent me across town to live with my grandmother, Madeline.

My last name would change when my mother remarried, but in 1961, it was Gardiner. A popular TV show then was “Adventures in Paradise,” starring the handsome and debonair Gardner McKay. Growing up with Mad, I became “The Little McKay.” She believed I resembled a smaller version of the actor.

Not until well into adulthood did I find my father, who also had remarried. His wife told me Dad once said that he didn’t want to live past 50, which I thought was odd. But when my father became a paraplegic as a result of an accident in Colorado – his second wife had left him by then – it made more sense.

In 1999, my second marriage ended and I was roaming the West when the news reached me of my mother’s death. I was staying in room 50 of the Paradise Inn, in Livingston, Montana.

Later, after my father passed away, I found among his papers a letter he had typed, perhaps drunkenly, to my mother. He expressed his regrets for ruining their life together and apologized. Jesus, he wrote, had saved him.

The letter, never mailed, was dated Aug. 5, 1989: the day before my father’s 63rd birthday, and exactly 10 years before the date on my mother’s death certificate.

I stored the box of my father’s ashes on a closet shelf for several years, unable to let them go. On my 50th birthday, I scattered them into the ocean off the coast of San Francisco, a place that's always felt like a paradise to me. I kept the key.

Randy Osborne read at "True Story!" #8 in January 2011.

Cake, anyone? True Story Turns Ten!

2011-07-19T04:03:00.000-07:00

...Well, sort of. Our tenth reading, fittingly enough, is all about dames and death. Stay tuned to this spot for excerpts from our readers' work...and come on our to Kavarna on Friday the 19th!

Candice DYER

Candice Dyer “yearns” a living as a yearnalist. She is a regular contributor to Atlanta magazine and The Atlantan, and her work has appeared in Men’s Journal, Paste, Garden & Gun, Georgia Music Magazine, Georgia Trend, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and other publications. Her essay about the 50th anniversary of Waffle House was anthologized in Cornbread Nation 4: The Best of Southern Food Writing. She is the author of Street Singers, Soul Shakers, and Rebels with a Cause: Music from Macon, which looks at Little Richard, Otis Redding, James Brown, the Allman Brothers Band, Wet Willie, Marshall Tucker, and other artists and music-makers with ties to Middle Georgia.

Joseph MORGAN

Joseph Scott Morgan became a death investigator with the Jefferson Parish Coroner’s Office in suburban New Orleans in 1985. At the time of his hire, Professor Morgan was estimated to have been the youngest medicolegal death investigator in the country working in a major metropolitan area. In 1992 he accepted the position of Senior Investigator with the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office in Atlanta, Georgia, where he remained until 2005 when he medically retired. During his tenure Professor Morgan was a part of the United States Department of Justice’s Task Force for the design of a national standards for death investigators nationwide.

He was one of the founding members of the American Board of Medicolegal Death Investigators. In 2002 Morgan achieved National Board Certified “Fellow” status, the highest ranking for a death investigator in the United States.

He teaches Forensics courses and a very unique Death Investigation course based on the national standards which he helped develop as a practitioner. He also conducts research involving the US Coroner system as well issues surrounding the notification of next of kin. He speaks regularly at conferences and universities nationwide.

Professor Morgan attended Jacksonville State University, National-Louis University, University of New Orleans and National University in LaJolla, California. He holds a Masters degree in Forensic Science as well as undergraduate degrees in Public Management (Biology minor) and Criminal Justice.

He is the author of Blood Beneath My Feet: The Journey of a Southern Death Investigator. This memoir is due out Spring of 2012, and is being published by Feral House Publications.

Kate SWEENEY

A native of Pittsburgh, Kate Sweeney harbors a fondness for rusted-out architecture and real hoagies. Her radio stories have won her a number of Associated Press awards and two Edward R. Murrow awards.

Kate lives in Atlanta where she works as a freelance writer, radio producer and host—and teaches college English. She is seeking a publisher for her nonfiction book, American Afterlife, the product of three years spent scribbling about America's truly fascinating death customs as she earned her MFA at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her radio stories appear regularly on WABE 90.1 FM, and her writing has appeared twice in Oxford American magazine as well as Atlanta magazine and New South.

"True Story!" 2011-2012 Season--Dates Announced

2011-07-06T04:36:00.000-07:00

Hey there, folks.
We've got a great crop of rogue writers and nervy journalists all set for the True Story stage this season, and we'll announce them here soon.

Meanwhile, we've got dates!
Kavarna has moved us up to the plum spot of third Friday, every other month, and we couldn't be more pleased.

Dates:
Friday, August 19th, 8:00 pm
Friday, October 21st, 8:00 pm
Friday, December 16th, 8:00 pm
Friday, February 17th, 8:00 pm
Friday, April 20th, 8:00 pm

We've still got some open slots for readers, too, so if you know of—or are—a rogue writer or nervy journalist with a piece you've been dying to read or an artifact you've been dying to share, be sure to get in touch, pronto, tonto.

By the way, the live-reading/storytelling/ranting scene in Atlanta couldn't be more fantastic right now, could it?, what with Carapace and Write Club rocking it, too. Rah, rah! Such good company.

Meantime, check back at this spot for August's slate of readers! See you at Kavarna.

"True Story!" #9 a Smashing Success; Up Next: Tell Your True Tale!

2011-03-27T12:31:00.001-07:00

A great big thanks to everyone who came out to "True Story!" #9! It was a veritable blast.

As Wednesday, April 13th approaches, we grow ever-more-excited about welcoming LA Times journalist and writer Sam Quinones, who's traveling to the ATL from the left coast and stopping by our stage for True Story's first-ever special event: an evening of storytelling and a nonfiction workshop. We are psyched to partner with the MA in American Studies Program at Kennesaw State University and the Georgia Writers Association to make it happen.

It should rule. Mark your calendars and bring your own nonfiction-in-the-making down to Kavarna at 8:00 pm on Wed. April 13th.

More on Sam Quinones' Nonfiction Workshops

Tell Your True Tale workshops get writers to think of their own experiences and of those around them as raw material for avoiding writer's block. We’ll work to make the writing read like fiction, but each story should be entirely nonfiction. By insisting on stories told in limited space, the True Tales approach forces writers to hone their thoughts and imagination, eliminate unnecessary words, make the hard choices that are part of strong writing, no matter the genre.

Even more on Sam and on April 13th reading here.
See ya there.

More on Wednesday, 3/16's Readers

2011-03-10T06:53:00.000-08:00

This spring is just filled with tantalizing true tales; with two amazing events up ahead, why not make it a very "True Story!" spring and come to both? We've told you about the unique nonfiction workshop and storytelling event with LA Times journalist and author Sam Quinones on Wednesday, April 13th.

And this coming Wednesday, we've got a traditional "True Story!"--with a trio of great readers who'll share artifacts from the past and tell their true tales.

Here's a taste-test of work from Lindsay Byron, Eileen Drennen, and Christal Presley.
See you at 8:00 at Kavarna.

Lindsay Byron,
from “Mono and MySpace”

“He’s got mono, and now we can’t kiss anymore, and he’s leaving in a week and a half so it might as well be tomorrow that I write, He’s leaving tomorrow, he’s leaving tomorrow. Before his diagnosis I had already resolved not to kiss him and my sister told me, Consider it over. And although I had planned to quit kissing him, I was momentarily devastated at the prospect of it really being over between us. I say that as if it ever began. It didn’t.

This one only ends.

But what does it matter that we’re done? My friend tells me this mono is a cosmic signal, and I am never more tempted to entertain such bullshit as now, when once again the circumstances of my life explicitly reveal to me that plans mean nothing and there is no meaning. I’d like to think, yeah, she’s right, this final biological attack on our pseudo-relationship is a clear portent of the universe telling me to stop. Stop with him. Every time we touch, it hurts.”

Eileen Drennen

My mother asks me to do her nails. So I get a bowl of sudsy water and play Madge from the Palmolive commercial, set the bowl on her rolling hospital tray, and soak her hands. I run the orange stick under her nails, clip and file each one, then rinse in cool water before rubbing lotion in with sleepy circles.

She likes her TV loud, especially for “The Quiet Man,” which never fails to bring back the Ireland of her happiest college days. Or the stretch in the 1960s and ‘70s when she visited yearly and everyone swore she hadn’t aged a day. Cousins ferried her to visit relatives or watch the horses or bask in the salt air of the sea. I have collected the stories she's told over the years like pink shells on a beach.

The pictures on the TV bring back the time when her world was wide open and she had no idea that love was no charm against trouble. Before she knew that families could splinter, or six children in 10 years might be too much, or that her life would become so small.
This is as close as she lets me be: warm suds in the afternoon sun, the chance to hold on to the person who made me. It is three years before she will leave me for good.

Christal Presley
from Thirty Days with my Father

“Dad says he’ll do it,” my mother says.

My hand is suddenly sweaty as I press the phone against my ear. Two days earlier, I’d called my mother to ask if she would relay a request to my father. I’d decided that would be the best way to gauge his reaction without actually having to deal with him directly. I wanted to know if he would be okay with my calling him every day for thirty days to ask him some questions about Vietnam and whatever else came up.

I’d thought I was finally strong enough to talk with him and hear whatever he had to say. But I now realized that my initial bravado had been resting precariously on my deep down certainty that my father would never say yes. He wasn’t supposed to say yes. Although I hadn’t consciously been aware of it when I made the call to my mother, I must have secretly believed he’d refuse so that I’d be able to tell myself I’d tried and go right on being angry with him as I had for as long as I could remember.

But he’d said yes. Now what was I going to do?

Special Event! Workshop with Journalist Sam Quinones

2011-03-03T06:31:00.000-08:00

Presented by “True Story!” Reading Series, the MA in American Studies Program at Kennesaw State University, and the Georgia Writers Association

Author and Journalist Sam Quinones

Wednesday, April 13th
8:00 p.m.
Kavarna Bar and Coffeeshop

Great news!

LA Times Reporter and creative nonfiction author Sam Quinones will take the “True Story!” stage at Kavarna on Wednesday, April 13th at 8:00 pm, to discuss his bold brand of reportage and to present a workshop on telling your own true story.

Sam Quinones is an LA Times reporter, storyteller, and author of two books of creative nonfiction about Mexico and Mexican immigration.

He also edits TELL YOUR TRUE TALE, an experiment in storytelling. He teaches a writing workshop of the same name, based on his books and the stories he's written for most of his 24-year journalism career. See more at www.samquinones.com.

We at “True Story” are so pleased to partner with the MA in American Studies Program at Kennesaw State University and the Georgia Writers’ Association to present this unique workshop-and-storytelling event.

More About Sam Quinones

He is the author of Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream and True Tales from Another Mexico.

The S.F. Chronicle Book Review called him “the most original American writer on the border and Mexico out there.”

The L.A. Times Book Review said “over the last 15 years, he has filed the best dispatches about Mexican migration and its effects on the United States and Mexico, bar none.”

Interested in developing your own true stories?

Come to Kavarna in Decatur, on Wednesday, April 13th. The event starts at 8:00. Arrive early and bring your true-stories-in-the-making!

More About the Workshop

Among the biggest challenges new writers face is figuring out what to write and how to start.

Tell Your True Tale workshops get them to think of their own experiences and of those around them as raw material for avoiding writer's block.

We’ll work to make them read like fiction, but each story should be entirely nonfiction.

By insisting on stories told in limited space, the True Tales approach forces writers to hone their thoughts and imagination, eliminate unnecessary words, make the hard choices that are part of strong writing, no matter the genre.

Our March 16th Readers: Where You've Seen 'em Before

2011-02-17T06:19:00.000-08:00

Hey there, folks.
March 16th is shaping up to be a fantastic night of truth-stranger-than-fiction. Read on.

Christal Presley
Born and raised in the mountains of Honaker, Virginia, Christal Presley is an instructional mentor teacher in Atlanta Public Schools, where she teaches new middle school teachers how to teach. She attained her bachelors and masters degrees from Virginia Tech and her Ph.D from Capella University. Her websites--United Children of Veterans and The Intergenerational PTSD Project--heighten awareness of how post-traumatic stress disorder can be transferred from generation to generation. In her recent memoir, Thirty Days with my Father, Christal talks to her father, from whom she was estranged for 13 years, about two demons that had, in her mind, become synonymous: her childhood and the Vietnam War.

Eileen Drennen
Eileen Drennen is freelance writer and editor who has spent most of the past 30 years in newsrooms, including 22 at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, but now works anywhere with good coffee and decent chairs. She recently completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Queens University in Charlotte, N.C.

Lindsay Byron
Lindsay Byron is a third-year PhD student in Literary Studies at Georgia State University, where her primary areas of focus are late-nineteenth and twentieth century American Literature. Although she currently devotes most of her writing to literary theory and social criticism, creative writing remains her first love, an activity that, like an illicit affair, she visits occasionally during the few gaps within her “real” life. As a new mom to a seven-month-old little boy, these gaps exist only in the form of her son’s two fitful naps a day, a time constraint that leads Lindsay to nickname herself “The Naptime Academic.”

Most recently, Lindsay’s fiction has been published in The Alembic, and her critical work has been published in The Eudora Welty Review and The Southern Literary Journal.

Come out to Kavarna at 8:00 p.m. on March 16th to see all three share artifacts and true tales!

Lovefest '11...and March's Readers

2011-02-03T08:54:00.000-08:00

Holy heck; is it possible that "True Story!" #8 was the strongest ever? Is it possible that it feels this way after every reading?? We heard what happens when a young anarchist struggles with the health care system, we heard riveting autobiographical poetry about superheros, supervillains and mortality itself, and the tale of a pancake house that kills its customers.

Who knows what's next.

Oh, wait, we do.

Check it out. Come out to Kavarna on Wednesday, March 16th as Christal Presley, Eileen Drennen and Lindsay Byron take the stage. More details are on their way.

“True Story” #8: The Cure for Cabin Fever

2011-01-13T08:50:00.000-08:00

Winter greetings from “True Story!” hq. Here’s hoping you and yours have made it safely through Snow Jam 2011.

We’ve got the cure for all that pent-up cabin fever next Thursday, Jan. 20th, in the form of a trio of TS readers who’ve traveled from other stages, other towns and yes, even other states to tell us tales of truth stranger than fiction.

Come thaw out. The artifact-sharing and storytelling gets underway at 8:00 p. at Kavarna in Decatur.

More on our readers and excerpts of their work:

Sonya Huber

Sonya Huber is the author of two books of creative nonfiction, Opa Nobody (2008) and Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir (2010), and a textbook, The Backwards Research Guide for Writers: Using Your Life for Reflection, Connection, and Inspiration (2010). Her work has been published in literary journals and magazines including Fourth Genre, Sports Literate, Passages North, Hotel Amerika, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Washington Post Magazine. She teaches in the Department of Writing and Linguistics at Georgia Southern University and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at Ashland University.

An excerpt from Sonya’s work

This is the story of my torrid and twisted love affair with health insurance.

I had known its embrace. Each blissful fling unfolded with delicious expectation, wet with whispers of forevermore. I entered these brief affairs with pink hope and the best of intentions. New health insurance cards—coy valentines—always arrived in plain white envelopes. Each plastic card was like a hotel room key that unlocked its own universe of safety and security, each with its own rules. Savoring my good fortune, I browsed the provider listing and chose a fresh crew of doctors to peer into my orifices. The courting and flirting began with a bit of game playing, the waiting periods and the occasional denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions. After new love’s rush of anticipation and insecurity, I made myself at home in each network, scattering the fragments of my medical history behind me like a trail of crushed candy hearts.

Take me. I’m yours. Hold me and never let me go.

Jason Mott

Jason Mott lives in Bolton, North Carolina. He received both his BFA & MFA from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. His poetry and fiction ranges from stories of southern family life to stories chronicling the secret lives of Wilma Flintstone and Betty Rubble. His poetry sometimes tells his own story and, other times, tells the stories of superheros and mythological figures. His work has appeared in various journals such as The Thomas Wolfe Review, The Kakalak Anthology of Carolina Poets, Measure and Chautauqua.

An Excerpt from Jason’s Work

(Written by The Joker)

Through your wall of chuckles–
through my wall of tears–
I heard you calling me. You
called to me and asked me

for more laughter—less pain in life—you hunted
for me the way Mars pined for Venus’s flower.
And, Padre, who am I, the Joker,
to refuse a laugh? Could Venus refuse?

Could Pandora say no
to that little black box
cooing gently in her lap
like a six-faced angel?

And what about Moses? Could he
not lead those folks from bondage?
(They asked him for it ya’know.)
But didn’t he come down from the mountain

full of good humor, colored hair, and poetry?

Randy Osborne

Randy Osborne is co-organizer of the local storytelling event MothUP Atlanta. He published the zine Big Pinch World, collaborated with Gianni Simone on the experimental memory book Made of This (www.madeofthis.org), and is finishing a collection of true stories, for which his agent waits with growing impatience. His essays, news features and reviews have appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Chicago Tribune, Riverfront Times (St. Louis), Creative Loafing (Atlanta), San Francisco Bay Guardian, Chicago Reader, The Progressive magazine, BioWorld Today, www.salon.com, www.playboy.com, and www.therumpus.net.

An Excerpt from Randy’s Work

On a summer afternoon in 1983, after she told everyone in the family she had quit smoking thanks to sheer will, hypnosis and acupuncture, my mother was arrested for shoplifting five packs of Salem cigarettes. She called me at the newspaper in tears. She knew the story hardly merited front-page treatment, probably wouldn’t even make the inside, but she also knew that I understood how the police and courts operate. She must have figured I could help get her off.

She had been framed, she said. Someone planted the cigarettes on her. She didn’t have a good reason why. When the manager detained her at the door, she argued. She refused to open her purse, but at last relented. “You better find what you’re looking for in here,” she said. He did.

My stepfather vowed to sue the damned store, and hired our town’s best criminal attorney, my friend Dan Cain. A week after they met to prepare the case, I visited Cain's office. Did she have a chance? Did he think she did it? “Those are two different questions,” Cain said, hands clasped behind his head, feet up on the desk. “What brand did she smoke, when smoked?”

I didn’t want to say, nor did I want to tell him about the crush my much-older mother suddenly had developed on him. He waited.

"True Story!" #8 Readers Announced!

2011-01-02T15:44:00.000-08:00

"True Story!" #8 is just around the corner and hoo daddy, are we excited.

This time, stepping up to tell true tales are three writers we've lured from one place or other:

1. Sonya Huber- The self-described "writer, teacher, mom, Midwesterner and Buddhist" is coming up from Statesboro to grace our stage. She's the author of Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir and this cooler-than-cool multimedia essay on how to write.

2. Jason Mott is a poet and fictioneer known to rock North Carolina stages so hard, we thought we'd bring him down here. Author of We Call This Thing Between Us Love.

3. Randy Osborne- One of the organizers behind Atlanta's very own fabulous Moth-Up storytelling nights, we were psyched to tempt him over to our stage. He writes here and here and his new book is Made of This.

We know this is gonna be one great night for amazing artifacts and true stories tantalizingly told. Hope to see you too, at Kavarna, 8:00 p.m. on Thursday, January 20th.

Mil gratzie!

2010-11-19T05:08:00.000-08:00

Thanks so much to everyone who came out to "True Story!" #7. Stay tuned for #8--January 20th, 2011!

Why You Should Come to this Thursday's "True Story!" Reading

2010-11-14T11:30:00.000-08:00

Folks, it's late November.
In advance of that six-week-or-so blur of casserole consumption and fund frittering known as The Holidays, it's time for a break—an entertaining evening of tales of yore, yesteryear and antiquity. Or perhaps just yesterday. What is known is that these readers are vetted. Painstakingly picked from a citizenry of thousands to bring you only the truest stories most tantalizingly told. We stand fast by our promise of being about the most fun you can on a Thursday night out for free.

Don't believe us? Read on! Excerpts follow from the evening's nervy journalists and rogue writers:

Jack Walsh
With a phone call, my time slot ringing the bell for the Salvation Army this Christmas season was set. I've come to see ringing the bell at the collection kettles as an annual holiday tradition, like going to the office party. And, like going to the office party, it's never as fun as I like to remember it. In fact, ringing the bell gets pretty old after 30 minutes. But, I'd say to myself, if you're going to jingle the Christmas bell, it ought to mean something. Like food for the poor, and also shelter, I guess. And whatever else the Salvation Army does. I'm not really sure, but it's probably pretty good. So, on goes the red apron and I ring for a few hours: a few hours out of an ever-lengthening season of over-indulgence. Clearly, I am a saint.

One of the feel-good holiday stories in the news this season has been about an antique gold piece found in a Salvation Army bucket. Of course, I have more than one person jokingly ask me if I've received one, and I laugh as if I haven't heard this yet. I do, however, have one woman rummage through her wallet and then say, "I thought I had change, but all I have is this Ugandan Token." I don't know what that is, but I would love to know what you get when you redeem it.

Anna Schachner
from "Letters to Mother Mexico"

Dear Frida Kahlo,

It was la virgen de guadalupe or you, and really, I couldn’t bring myself to ask her, what with that ring of light around her head, that cosmic baby safe in a womb as history-less and clean as a polished church pew. So I chose you—you with the indifferent monkeys on your shoulders; and the sleek rifle aimed straight up your gut past your chin; and all those babies you never had. Here’s what I want to know: Where does Mexico end? Where?

About Our Nov. 18th Readers

2010-11-07T11:35:00.000-08:00

"True Story!" #7 is almost here, and boy, have we a bevy of truth-tellers to tell you about. See you on Thursday 11/18.

Jack Walsh
Jack Walsh occasionally writes things down, but mainly he does long interviews with lots of people and carves them up into stuff that usually makes sense. So, he's responsible for what can loosely be called "writing" on the WPBA magazine program This is Atlanta, much of which he also shoots, edits, and produces.

He is also the co-writer and co-producer of Get Delicious! and most recently directed and co-wrote the documentary “Four Days at Dragon*Con,” which may or may not be aired nationally depending on some legal crap still being hashed out. His work has received 13 Telly Awards, and he has won a Southeast Regional Emmy—and lost eight others.

Anna Schachner
A former music journalist, Anna Schachner holds a MFA in fiction from Bowling Green State University and a M.A. in English Literature from Georgia State University. She writes short stories, many of which have been published in literary journals such as Puerto del Sol, Ontario Review, and Calyx, and has won several national story-writing contests. She also writes novels, the most recent of which is set in Mexico, her favorite place in the world. She teaches Creative Writing full-time at Georgia Perimeter College, where she was the former Fiction Editor of The Chattahoochee Review, and part-time at Emory University. She runs a small jewelry design business and dog-walking service as well, providing her time to “think out” plot, which, in attempting to stay alive as a writer, she has only recently fully embraced, much to her delight.

Kimberlee Payton
Kimberlee Payton is an attorney, writer, and theologian. She is originally from Washington, DC. She worked as a prosecutor in the Illinois, as a legal journalist in Washington, DC, and worked in the legal and business publishing in San Francisco and Atlanta.

She is currently at student at Candler School of Theology and is the inaugaral candidate for the JSD, a doctorate in law and religion, at Emory Law School.

Currently, she is working on a long overdue manuscript, SavingRace, to be published by Prometheus Books, and her online essay series, "Single Ladee Chronicles" and "Church Ladee Chronicles," at purposefulee.com.

November Readers Announced!

2010-10-13T08:04:00.000-07:00

Hey there, everyone!
The next "True Story!" night is Thursday, November 18th, and we've got a fine batch of truth-tellers poised to take the stage.

Anna Schachner!
Leigh Peyton!
Jack Walsh!

Mark your calendar, your digital schedule-keeping device or the back of your left hand for 11/18 at Kavarna at 8:00 p.m for another great evening of Artifacts from the Past and Tales so True they Can't Help but Tantalize.

Stay tuned for more on our readers.

Why Should You Go to True Story #6? Here's why.

2010-09-14T17:14:00.000-07:00

Your friends have all been telling you to go for months now. It's about the most fun you can have for free, except for your food, coffee, or libation tab. It's been over a week since the Decatur Book Festival and two weeks till the next ATL Mothup and you're jonesing like mad for some really, really good live stories. You love hearing people talk about their embarrassing pasts. You love good writing. You love sitting in a dimmed room, awestruck in a hushed crowd.

The very best reason, however, is that these three readers will knock your ever-lovin' socks off.

Some excerpts from their work
(though not necessarily what they'll read on Thursday)

Jef Blocker
From “How to Get Kidnapped in East Atlanta Village”
“Jef, I’m not content,” Trixie said into the phone. This was nothing new. Trix has ridden the crest of the pop culture wave for as long as I’d known her, usually abandoning the newest fad on arrival for being so five minutes ago. “I want to do something different for my birthday this year.”
I shuddered. Over the last twenty years, I have been part of Trixie’s birthday celebrations that have incorporated activities as innocuous as firing ceramics to the pinnacle of tastelessness, such as midget tossing. “They like the funny feeling they get in their tummies while in flight,” Trixie promised.
“So what do you want do this year?” I asked.
“I want to get kidnapped in East Atlanta Village,” she said.
I tapped my receiver. “I don’t think I heard you right.”
“You heard me,” she said. “I want to be abducted in the EAV.”
“Whatever for?”
“Everybody who’s anybody is getting kidnapped in East Atlanta,” she said. “Besides, I already have my outfit picked out for when I go on Larry King Live.”
“Trixie, this is the dumbest idea you’ve had since you tried to stage a production of Gone with the Wind in Esperanto!” I hung up and forgot her harebrained scheme.
A few days later, Trixie called me again.
“Where are you?” I asked. “You sound like you’re in a hole.”
“I’m in my trunk,” she panted. “I wanted to practice removing my cell phone from my pocket and calling for help.’
“I’m hanging up now,” I said.
“No!” she cried. “I need you to come over and let me out of the trunk ... I think I’m running out of air.”

Shannon Turner
From “Borders”
For the better part of my first thirty years, romance consisted of only one definable trend: huge, unrequited crushes.

In case you’re unfamiliar, the crush is called a “crush” because of the general compression you feel around your heart most of the time, particularly toward the end of the crush period. It begins with light, floaty happy feelings, but as time goes on, when those feelings are not given over to action, they turn to what my friend, Erica, calls “fring.” The molecules spin faster and faster inside your chest creating a nearly drunken feeling, which can then quickly turn into deep, dark depression.

My crushes roughly followed this pattern no matter how old I was:
1. Meet a male human being, become friends with him, spending lots of time with him until I suddenly realize that I no longer just want to be friends with this person.
2. Tell every girlfriend I have about the way I’m feeling, do not tell him how I’m feeling, and maybe tell some of his friends in hopes that they might spill the beans but absolutely forbid them from saying anything to him.
3. Awkwardly flirt, be mean, do weird motherly things for him, and/or do nothing and pine.
4. Make mix tapes/CDs (depending on the decade) in honor of the crush. Perhaps give him the mix tape/CD in hopes that he will pick up on the subliminal messages.
5. Re-hash all interactions with girlfriends as a way of feeling that progress has been made.
6. Repeat steps 2-5 over and over until…
7. Explosion in some form or fashion (a fight, a confession) must occur so that:
a. Friendship must end.
b. Crush can subside.

I can’t really say how or why I developed this pattern or why it lasted for so long. It never – and I mean never, ever – actually progressed to actual romantic activity with a single one of my crush recipients. Tim, Bryan, Paul, Dewald (the South African), video store guy…I could write a country song about them all while drawing little heart-shapes around each one’s name.

Suzanne Van Atten
I went to the hospital today. I've been several times over the last week. Complications from a wreck two months ago have landed my ex-boyfriend in the VA hospital. I'd nearly forgotten he was once a Marine. He'd joined as a teenager to escape an adolescent brush with the law. Although the Vietnam War was in full swing then, the Marines had already pulled out and he'd spent his one stint at Camp Pendleton in Southern California. Now he's having holes drilled in his head to drain the blood that has pooled up in his brain and is pressing on his gray matter, triggering strange seizures. When one occurs, he remains fully conscious but the left side of his face becomes paralyzed and he loses the ability to speak. I witness one with a horror I try to mask as he struggles through crooked lips and thick tongue to form simple words that no longer have meaning in the midst of our forgotten conversation.

On my first visit to the hospital I brought him a miniature Christmas tree made of wire and green glitter along with a bag of drugstore chocolates. I knew he would crave the sugar once the alcohol withdrawal kicked in. Tonight's visit followed his surgery. I averted my eyes from the sight of his shaven head and the three incisions held together by crude rows of staples that look like train tracks across his skull. I fed him tiny bites of grilled chicken from a hospital tray. When I stretched across him to adjust some of the tangled tubes and wires that attached him to a room full of blinking, beeping monitors, he reached out and fondled my breast. I stopped in the ladies' room on my way out of the hospital to have a good cry before driving home in the dark.

More about our Sept. 16th Readers

2010-09-07T05:15:00.000-07:00

Suzanne Van Atten is an editor for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and is the author of several travel books on Puerto Rico. She recently completed her MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing at Queens University of Charlotte and has an essay in the current issue of the Gettysburg Review. She is teaching nonfiction writing classes at Evenings at Emory this fall.

Shannon M. Turner works for Alternate ROOTS as Manager of Programs & Services. When she's not being an arts administrator, she also blogs, writes poetry, performs, and tells a pretty good story (especially at the local MothUp on the 4th Tuesday of every month at Manuel's Tavern).

Shannon enjoys her residence in the Little 5 Points community, and along with her active membership in Alternate ROOTS since 2005, she serves on the Advisory Board for the Community Arts Network. She graduated with an M.F.A. in Arts Administration and Public Dialogue from Virginia Tech and received a B.A. from Emory & Henry College where she majored in English lit and minored in Women's Studies. Shannon's favorite title is "coolest aunt in the world."

Jef Blocker is a native Texan who moved to Atlanta in 1996 because he wanted to know what it was like to live someplace where the ten o’clock news came on at eleven. He works as a recruiter for a non-profit and as the store manager for Bound To Be Read Books in East Atlanta Village. He lives in Grant Park and has a disproportionate number of friends named Jeff. When he is not doing the bookstore cat’s evil bidding, Jef enjoys driving with the top down on his Miata and blasting ‘80s music from his humongous sub-woofer.

Jef’s short fiction, essays, and poetry have been featured on the BBC’s Get Writing
website and the online literary magazine Clockwise Cat, as well as winning several writing contests. He was also invited to pitch his screenplays at The Perfect
Pitch contest at the Atlanta Film Festival in 2004 and 2006, where he described one
scripts as “Home Alone meets Basic Instinct.” Jef is a member of the Atlanta Writers Club. Rumors that he can unhinge his jaws and swallow his food whole are true.

Next Reading: Thursday, Sept. 16th

2010-08-30T07:19:00.000-07:00

Hey, all. True Story #6 is here! We're pleased as punch to announce our next reading and our next group of true storytellers.

Come on out to Kavarna Thursday, September 16th at 8:00 p.m. to see...

1. Jef Blocker Bound to Be Read Businessman and True Storyteller in his own Right
2. Shannon Turner Poet, Writer and Alternate Roots-er
2. Suzanne Van Atten AJC Journalista

And yes, we promise, we'll have audio from the previous reading up soon. Posting audio on Blogger has turned out to be something of a challenge, but we've always been up to a good challenge here at True Story. Stay tuned.

Seriously? The readers at next Wednesday's "True Story!" reading are going to rock it so hard.

2010-07-23T14:41:00.000-07:00

Don't believe me? Check out these excerpts from their work.

Candice Dyer
From her article, “Greetings from Helen,” about the biggest and booziest Oktoberfest celebration in the world, held in the north Georgia mountains:

Other spectacles just as memorable, but not likely to be remembered clearly, will unfold in the tavern parking lots, including fist-fights, heaving expurgations, and acts of urgent carnal release—sometimes all involving the same two people. In a strange hybrid of highland folkways, Helen is where gemütlichkeit—the arm-linking, swaying-together fellowship of the Alps—abets the hell-raising volatility of Appalachia. The enduring joke about Helen, along with the “Helen a hand-basket” puns, goes: “I wonder if somewhere in Bavaria there is a North Georgia tourist town of trailer parks, gun dealers, and live-bait shops?” If only Lynyrd Skynyrd could yodel.

Jason Hartley
…Like most of the extraordinary discoveries in human history, the Advanced Genius Theory had its eureka moment in an ordinary place.
….Though it is difficult to pin down an exact date, the theory came to life sometime around 1992, when Britt Bergman and I got together for that fateful meeting at the Pizza Hut, near the University of South Carolina. Somehow we got on the subject of the decline of Lou Reed, whose music Britt introduced me to in high school. The Velvet Underground was unquestionably one of the greatest bands ever, but we wondered why Reed had made those Honda scooter commercials and why he had such a terrible haircut and why he always played "Walk on the Wild Side" on Late Night, and, finally, why his music had gotten so embarrassingly bad. And then it hit us: the Velvet Underground were ahead of their time in the 60s, so maybe Reed was ahead of our time in the 80s and 90s. Maybe he was just as much of a genius in the days of "The Original Wrapper" as he was when he wrote "Venus in Furs." Maybe he was expressing his genius in a way we didn't yet understand. And if this were true, could it also be true of other geniuses throughout history? We knew that we were on to something bigger than just explaining Lou Reed's haircut, and consequently for the last fifteen years, I have devoted my life to understanding Advancement.

Liane Lemaster
My grandmother kept the human braid in the bottom drawer of her dresser, wrapped in newspaper, dated June 14th 1926. I found it when I was seven. It was raining. Usually, when I came to visit my family in West Virginia, my mother sat at the Formica table in my grandmother’s kitchen and smoked and complained about the railroad tracks being so close to the house while my father sat in the other room and watched TV until it was time to eat again. Usually, when it didn’t rain, my cousins and I swam, fished, climbed, foraged, got lost in the woods, made tracks for people to find us, climbed, teased dogs, built huts, climbed again, and made up games that were specific and mean—if you can’t make it to the top of the hill then I will slice your head off, if you can’t make it to the next laurel branch then I will slice your head off and eat it, if you can’t make it back to Mamaw’s, then I will slice the heads off of all your family and rub them in gum and stick a spit through them and roast them like a pig, starting now. We loved it because it we were young enough and we felt safe enough to know it would never happen.

But this summer visit, the summer that I found the human hair in the drawer, my cousins weren’t around.

...Come see all three, plus their Artifacts from the Past, at "True Story!", next Wednesday, July 28th at 8:00 pm at Kavarna in Decatur.

About Our July 28th Readers

2010-07-13T06:27:00.000-07:00

Candice Dyer
Candice Dyer is the longtime "writer at large" for Atlanta magazine and the author of Street Singers, Soul Shakers, and Rebels With a Cause: Music from Macon, which covers Little Richard, Otis Redding, the Allman Brothers Band, and a cavalcade of other characters. Her work has appeared in Men's Journal, Garden & Gun, Paste, Georgia Music Magazine, Brightleaf: A Journal of Southern Writing, Georgia Trend, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Her essay about the 50th anniversary of Waffle House was selected for the anthology Cornbread Nation 4: The Best of Southern Food Writing.

Jason Hartley
Jason Hartley is a writer, musician, online marketer, and author of The Advanced Genius Theory. He holds a BA in English from the University of South Carolina. He has worked professionally as a dancer and choreographer, and has studied at the American Dance Festival, Dance Space, Inc., and Movement Research. He has written for Esquire, Spin.com, and VH-1's Best Week Ever blog. Since 2004, Jason has maintained his own website, Advanced Theory Blog. Originally from South Carolina, he now lives in Georgia.

Liane Lemaster
Liane LeMaster’s fiction has appeared in the Chattahoochee Review, the Mississippi Review, Sub-Lit, and Smokelong Quarterly. She won the 2007 Porter Fleming Literary Prize and the 2006 Paul Bowles Fellowship for Creative Writing at Georgia State University. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize and the New Millennium Fiction Award. She completed her undergraduate degree in Speech/Communication at Northwestern University and was Literary Manager of Amicus Theatre in Chicago. This is her first attempt at writing a true story but she tells lies all the time.

July "True Story!" Readers Announced!

2010-07-06T14:41:00.000-07:00

We are quite please to announce our readers for the next "True Story!" reading at Kavarna, Wednesday, July 28th, at 8:00 p.m.

They are:

Candice Dyer You've seen her breathtaking prose in Atlanta, Paste--and yes, even Garden and Gun (as well as about two-dozen other places). And now the magazine maven will read with us!

Jason Hartley His book, The Advanced Genius Theory, has taken the arts world by storm--and threatened the very craft of music criticism!

Liane Lemaster This fictionista will complete the trifecta--bringing her nonfiction skills to the table in one amazing night of "True Story!"

More to come. Stay tuned.