You ain’t no virgin, his father said as the boy drove west on Franklin Street his first time behind the wheel You’ve done this before, and he had, one Christmas eve, a few years back his father dead drunk and snoring in the bed upstairs when Midnight Mass let out and their maroon and crème ‘53 Plymouth blocked traffic on Lyndhurst street with its rear end protruding where Pop had tried to park it without the bicycle in the trunk for his daughter because the shop was closed when he finally arrived, half-in-the-bag and rapping at the door before coming home to yell at his family for the …

Poet Truth Thomas and essayist Elise Armacost will headline this month’s Greektown Reading Series – Thursday, October 18 – at the newly renovated Ikaros restaurant at the corner of Eastern Avenue and Ponca Street. Just added to the bill—which will feature the oil paintings of Ikaros’ founder Xenos Kohilas—is young singer/songwriter sensation Allison Olender and Fishbowl columnist Marion Winik. Asked to describe the essence of the work he will present, Thomas said he would shine a light on the nobility of those struggling among us as well as "poems that chronicle the human quest for love to …

Low Down on Low Dog: The Short Fiction of Jason Tinney                                                                                        - by Rafael Alvarez                 "… his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names …"                                                                                                             - "Abaslom, Absalom." Jason Tinney and I drove from Houston to Los Angeles in January 2007, a road trip much different from the one he portrays here in his new short story, "Pressed Luck." Roaring a couple thousand miles east on …

The first readings of poetry and short fiction I organized were held at Miss Bonnie’s Elvis Bar at the corner of Fleet and Port Street near Patterson Park. This was back in the days of the Story Company, a literary circus I ran with lifelong friend Tyrone Crawley. You may recall our annual $99 Short Story Contest in which stories were judged by the likes of Rick Bass, Madison Smartt Bell and Moe Drabowsky. Performers included former Sunpapers rewrite man David Michael Ettlin, now a member of the Aging Newspapermen of Baltimore, and a fiddle/guitar duo (friends of Miss Bonnie) who dressed in …

I’ve been fighting this fight a long time, from my earliest days as an unpaid rookie on Russell Smith’s fledgling City Paper in 1977 to a recent impasse with a Wall Street Journal editor. If it happens to me, I think you should read about it. That’s how I make sense of the world. Smith wasn’t keen on an encounter I had on a city transit bus with a guy who drew comics. In 1993, the managing editor of the Baltimore Sun loathed a cross-country tale about making novenas for the piano player Richard Manuel [1943-to-1986.] And most recently, the WSJ editor passed on a story he’d requested about the…

                         “Only food bought at the Dog House can be eaten at the Dog House …”   July 1, 1988 A week after she’d been arrested in the alley behind G&A Coney Island Hot Dogs, Nieves remained lost in the corridors and paperwork of the Baltimore City Jail’s Central Book warehouse. At first, Nieves shared a cage with 50 women and two toilets; then a much smaller cell crammed with eight suspects and finally, the night before Basilio got her out, alone with a grandiose drunk named Joyce who believed herself superior to common drug addicts. “My mother used to talk about Walter Criddle…

May 24, 1988. On the afternoon of his 30th birthday—a date he shared with Bob Dylan, the day Elmore James took a cannonball from the Delta to the South Side to the empyrean—Basilio walked to Miss Bonnie’s to have a few in the Shadow of the King. It was the middle of the afternoon. If there was going to be a party to mark the occasion, Basilio wasn’t aware of it. So he partied with Miss Bonnie and his old friend Hettleman. “On the house,” said Bonnie, pouring a shot of Wild Turkey to go with the cheap draught he’d ordered. “In the alley,” winked Hettleman, jerking his head toward the side door…

As a country, we've become increasingly familiar with the impasse, the stalemate, the deadlock--first the US government debacle last summer, the Maryland state legislature, and now, the standoff that prevented a prestigious fiction award from being given. In-action is the new action. In the rapidly changing book publishing industry, all manner of publishers are locked in a steel cage match with Amazon.com as they try to wrest back margin from the nation's largest online retailer to shrinking bottom lines. It's not likely to end well for publishers, bookstores and ultimately, writers. The …

Ron Marcus is a lifetime Baltimorean who studied writing with Tim O’Brien at Emerson College in Boston. A disciple of the poet John Berryman, Marcus can be reached via  ronmarcus23@hotmail.com. Enjoy his poem, which follows. — Rafael Alvarez                                                                                                                       Robert Oppeheimer: Martyr with a Radioactive Half-Life   The disquieted ghost of Memory haunted me and Remembrance attacked me from my blind side of disbelief from somewhere miles deep inside the rotting, moldy splendor of the grave with …

Review by Anthony C. Hayes In his introduction to Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut entrusts his readers with the moral of the story: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”  Cutting through the potential pretense of a cultural icon is admittedly a delicate affair. One must tread carefully in the court of the king. In his new book, And So It Goes - Kurt Vonnegut: A Life, Charles J. Shields not only walks gingerly, he plays it smart, delivering a biography which illuminates the subject and should benefit both the seasoned buff and the fledgling first year student…

  Editor's Note: Actor John Astin is scheduled to deliver dramatic readings of Edgar Allan Poe's writings at 7 p.m. on March 3 at the writer's grave at Westminster Church, 519 W. Fayette Street. The event will raise money for the Poe House.   --- By Terin Miller When I think of Edgar Allan Poe, I think of darkness. Not a bad darkness, but the darkness of men’s souls and thoughts. I’ve always shared Poe’s interest in that realm, where many of man’s basest desires lurk. And I admire his ability to show civilization as a veneer, the shiny outer shell with which we present ourselves to the world—…

By Caryn Coyle It was too warm in the church.  Jack could feel sweat pooling at the bottom of his spine.  He thought of jiggling his arm out of the sleeve of his overcoat and shrugging it off.  But he would have to stand up to do it, drawing attention to himself.  Jack's mother, Elizabeth, sat beside him on the pew.  His six-year-old daughter, Genevive, on her other side.  Elizabeth held a linen handkerchief with tiny flowers embroidered around the hem and it smelled of lavender.  The scent was faint, like it wasn't really there.  He could feel his mother's arm brushing up against his, and he…

On a Thanksgiving cross-country road trip from Baltimore to the Golden State and back last year, I met the poet Alan Kaufman—a boy of the Bronx, former Israeli soldier, editor of the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry—through a mutual friend in the big, bad world of letters. Kaufman met me and my daughter Amelia in the lobby of the Handlery Hotel in Union Square, where we were staying to celebrate her birthday. He then took me on a long walk to Chinatown, commenting along the way on subjects as disparate as happy marriages and Philip Roth; noting with glee that we could easily be in China, so …

These are the warriors, peacemakers and wild cards that trudge onward in the Long Vietnam of My Soul.   Basilio Boullosa, volunteer and grunt, born in Baltimore, 1959. Divorced father of a young daughter. An artist who works in oils and makes his living painting pictures of crabs and fish on the side of seafood trucks. “He tells me that my dress reminds him of the sunflowers his grandmother used to grow in her backyard until the summer she passed away "right there," and he points through the window . . .” Grandpop, decorated veteran, born in Galicia, Spain in 1904. Widower. Arrived in …

". . . the lot even paved like a desert, the door                                 to the dining room a back door, the front door                                 lost in the lights . . ."                                                —Afaa Weaver on his beloved Crabtown                     A sleigh full of poetry, prose and music will land at the Frank Zappa statue in East Baltimore this Saturday when Rafael Alvarez, the literary pied piper of Highlandtown, host an afternoon of holiday entertainment at the Southeast Branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. Alvarez, author of the Christmas tale…

By Francis Lazzaro "Everyone finds their own Eden..." —Damon Norko  The concept of revolution emanates from the novel "The Delilah Factor" like a lone light post on an empty street at midnight. My initial reaction to the grim and vulgar setting of Damon Norko's novel was disgust sprinkled with taboo curiosity. Norko constructs a disturbing world of men who, because of a scarcity of women, only find pleasure in lust without romance. The setting is dark and satirical with a thick film of pornographic imagery. Yet the atmosphere is penetrated by the familiar tale of tragic romance. Norko’s hero—…

Inspired by Homer’s Iliad, the poems of Charles Bukowski and Hunter S. Thompson, Francis Lazzaro V is the 19-year-old poet laureate of the G&A Coney Island Hot Dog diner in Highlandtown.   Lazzaro explained over coffee that he works as a busboy at the legendary establishment performing “jobs that no one else wants to do.” He is also in love with Demi, daughter of the third-generation hot dog king who owns the joint. Demi has a profound influence on Lazzaro’s writing. “She’s the canvas, the window that I’m looking through when I write,” he said. “Poetry is a way to express my love for life. It…

Mark Sanders as Poe! Wow. Could Sanders please be invited to recite “The Raven" at a Ravens game? He deserves an M&T Bank stadium-sized audience. Sanders, long a fixture on the Baltimore poetry scene, cleverly weaves Poe’s masterful poem throughout the play. As he did, I realized that The Raven is not a schlocky poem for school kids, it’s only—and unfortunately—been taught that way. Sanders wrings all of the emotion from the poem, using the 1845 narrative gem as the spine for his one-man show. Bring your hankies. In this wrenching one-man, three-act performance, Sanders does not concentrate …

“Poe was always great not only in his noble conceptions but also as a prankster …”  —Charles Baudelaire The ghost of Edgar Allan Poe has been floating around town these last few weeks, unmoored and searching for an abandoned dwelling in case he is locked out of 203 N. Amity Street on Jan. 1. In these sparse economic times, funding for the Poe House has been slashed and its doors are slated to shut. Lined up across from center, his apparition spooked Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez before his first fumble last Sunday night. Poe has significant ties to the purple and black, just ask Raven mascots…

On Tuesday, Oct. 11, Stephen Demczuk—local brewmaster and creator of Raven Lager—will host "Pints for Poe" in Highlandtown. The event will take place from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the Creative Alliance, housed in the old Patterson Theater at 3134 Eastern Ave. "Pints for Poe" is a "pay as you go" tasting event with an opportunity to sample a wide range of local brews. Proceeds will go to save the Poe House from city budget cuts. Each participant will receive a pint glass adorned with either the poet's face or the image of a raven. Poe himself—no stranger to an ale—is expected to make a cameo. For …