New review of Box Cutters

I am so, so happy to announce that Danny M. Hoey, Jr, author of the novel The Butterfly Lady, has written a review of my chapbook, Box Cutters! The review is up at Heavy Feather Review, and it’s beautifully kind!

In language that is poetic, evocative, and lean, Snoek-Brown has managed to create a world that is authentic and laced with pain that lingers long after you have finished the book.

He offers some fascinating readings of a few of the stories in the book (I love when people break down my work this way, showing me not only things I hoped people would get but also things I never realized were in there!), and then he finishes with some heartwarming praise:

The complexity in these tiny stories is large and voracious and it swallows you and forces you to reckon with what can cut you, harm you, if you are not careful. Samuel Snoek-Brown, an Oregon Literary Fellow, will continue to amaze you and haunt you with his lyricism and critique of human nature. I look forward to reading his debut novel to see how he expands on his talent.

(That novel, Hagridden, will be out this August, by the way. So stay tuned, gang!)

Thanks so much to Danny Hoey and to Heavy Feather Review! It’s not even 9 am here, and already my whole day is made.

Wanna talk writing? Get possessed by the Lit Demon

1966064_1435953959985329_5969882273842050095_oThe very cool folks over at Cease, Cows have branched out into a new venture and launched a literary community called Lit Demon. Part resource for writers and part online workshop, the site provides “connection, instruction, information, and maybe other -tions we aren’t able to list.” Their workshops include live webinars, one-on-one instruction, and self-paced writing courses, and the rest of the website offers writers discussion forums, a blog on literary issues, editing and book design services, and otherwise general awesomeness.

They already have two workshops available for enrollment: a fabulism workshop (Waving at the Fabulous: How to Write New Wave Fabulism; begins May 10) and a bizarro workshop (A Talking Eyeball Walks into a Bar: An Introduction to Writing Bizarro Fiction; begins June 7).

If neither of these workshops float your boat, sign up at the website anyway and keep an eye on it, because there’s plenty more coming down the pike. In fact, I’ll be running a course of my own later this year.

The whole venture sounds awesome (I know the gang behind all this), and they’re just getting started, so sign up at the website now to get in on the ground floor and watch this thing take off.

And for all you pros out there, they’re still accepting applications for instructors! Fill out an application here.

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New publication

Narghile

The new issue of Red Fez, one of the coolest literary magazines online, is out today, and I have a new story in it. It’s called “To Smoke the Hookahs,” and I think you’ll dig it.

But don’t just check out my story; this whole issue is awesome, including more fiction, articles on everything from food to autism, comics, videos, poems from Misti Rainwater and Tara Rose, and a book review from Bud Smith.

So settle in, put the coal on the shisha, and have fun, gang.

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A minor rearranging

Reading at the release of the Portland Review Winter 2014 issue, at the East End in Portland, OR, April 2014.
Reading at the release of the Portland Review Winter 2014 issue, at the East End in Portland, OR, April 2014.

Not that this is newsworthy, but I tweaked the website a bit today: now, under the About tab, you’ll find a link to my “Teaching & literary photos” page, which is really just a slideshow. The pix are mostly of me teaching or me at readings, but they’re kind of fun in that some are of recent readings, so you can see what I’ve been up to lately, and some are hilariously old (there’s even a photo of me in high school, teaching 2nd-graders about ancient Japan).

That’s right: there’s a photo of me before I had the long hair and goatee.

You’re welcome, Internet.

New publication

image

I’ve written about this before, from time to time, but now it’s out in the world, waiting for you to buy it: the Revenge of the Scammed anthology, a benefit book to help out writer Edward J Rathke, is now available for purchase at Amazon.

In it, you’ll find my story, “What Scholars Study They Strive to Kill,” along with fantastic fiction by David S. Atkinson, Douglas Hackle, Ben Tanzer, William Lemon, and a slew of other great writers.

Check it out, support Eddy Rathke and publisher Bartleby Snopes and all the other writers who chipped in to help our colleague. And enjoy some great writing.

Smells like springtime to the Jersey Devil

JDP april14 coverAnd by “smells like springtime,” we mean it smells like oranges that make you want to eat people. Because what else says “spring” like birth and death and roaming corpses and killer oranges and voracious cannibalistic appetites and companion slugs?

Corpses and slugs, folks. Happy freaking Spring!

Plus some deceptively haunting cover art by photographer Isabella Petty!

Scintilla Press is crowdfunding

Hey, gang. You like me, right? You like what I do here? You like what I write?

Maybe you’ve read my short story “No Milk Would Come” in the second issue of Scintilla magazine. Maybe you thought that story was pretty awesome, and you kept reading to see what else Scintilla publishes. Maybe you liked what you saw so much you kept coming back for more, because Scintilla is awesome and they publish great stuff.

Maybe you’d like to keep reading Scintilla.

Well, to help make that happen, go check out their call for funds, and either kick in a few bucks or spread the word to all your rich friends.

Let’s keep literature alive!

Thanks, gang!

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Photo blog: As Seen from the Train

On our recent train trip from Portland, OR to Vancouver, BC for spring break, my wife and I talked, read books, worked online (thanks to Amtrak’s free wifi aboard their Cascades line), and, of course, enjoyed the passing scenery. At the time, I remarked, here on the blog and on Facebook and Twitter, on the different quality of scenery you get from a train window. It’s similar in some ways to the views you might get from a car, but the windows are bigger, affording a wider view, and, more importantly, the train tracks take you places you don’t usually see by car, including into heavily industrial areas and along the coast so close to the water you can peer down the windowpane and see the rivers and inlet lapping practically over the tracks themselves.

As I watched the countryside rolling by, I starting imagining the scenery as part of a photo series. So I started taking pictures.

What follows are a few series of photos taken by cell phone, some my own and some my wife’s (marked JSB for Jennifer Snoek-Brown). The quality isn’t great and the images might only be interesting to us, but I thought these were a fairly cool way to tell a story about train travel, so here they are.

Station

Working

Railway

Train station, Centralia, WA (photo by Samuel Snoek-Brown)
Train station, Centralia, WA

Shoreline

Boats

Industry

Farmland

Bridges

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Portland Review Winter 2014 Issue Launch Party, April 1

1485915_617703784966053_215580874_oNo fooling: This coming Tuesday, on April 1, I’ll be reading with a bunch of my fellow writers appearing in the newly-released Winter 2014 issue of the Portland Review. The issue contains my story “Mathematics,” which isn’t online (yet?) so if you want to check it out, you should get a copy of the issue. Or, if you’re in the Portland area, come hear me read from the story (and get a copy of the issue).

The reading is from 6-8 pm at the East End bar. (Drinking starts when you get there and continues as long as you can manage. But don’t drink and cycle, Portlanders!)

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Yet another travelogue: Vancouver, BC to Portland, OR

27 March 2014

Our morning was ridiculous only because of the hour. I had to wake up at 3 am to make sure everything was packed and ready to go by 4. Then Jennifer sat in the lobby of our borrowed apartment building while I hiked a dozen blocks across town to drop of the keys in the dead of the morning. Afterward, we caught a taxi to the train station, thinking that getting there a full 90 minutes early was a bit silly but, you know, better safe than sorry. Turns out we timed it just right: once we got our bearings in the little station, we had exactly enough time to fill out our customs forms before lining up at ticketing and immigrations services, and then, quick as you please, we were on the train!

So, lucky timing and, despite the absurdly early hour, everything went as smoothly as I have ever experienced on travel, especially considering this was international travel.

I wrote a bit about this in my last rhapsody about Amtrak, but now that I’ve crossed a border aboard a train, it bears repeating: I can’t image why anyone would ever choose to drive or fly long distance. Having lived overseas — and being travel-lovers in general anyway — my wife and I have gone on our share of international journeys together. We’ve had the occasional “random” search or nearly-missed connection, and there was the whole week-long stranded-in-Amsterdam saga, but for the most part, we’ve been extraordinarily lucky in how smoothly our travel has gone. And even considering that, we have never once experienced this kind of ease checking in or passing through customs and immigration.

For example, at the airport, you have to arrive at least an hour early — two hours for international travel — because that’s how long it takes to fight the crowds, get checked in, run your baggage and then yourself through at least one level (sometimes two or three levels) of security, get scanned, poked, and groped, hike a few football fields to your gate, and then wait around for your boarding group to come up so you can finally squeeze onto a cramped little plane.

At the train station, ticketing and immigration and security scanning (no xrays or groping, just a conveyor belt for the bags) took all of five minutes, total. And that was it. Once we were through, we walked the length of the train and boarded our car and we were done. No crowds, no interrogations, no long treks through the terminal or long waits for boarding groups. A few minutes to get our bearings, 10 minutes to go through our receipts and fill out the customs card, and five minutes for boarding. The rest of our 90-minute early arrival was spent settling in on the train, finding the toilets, grabbing coffee from the bistro card, setting up the free wifi…. All in the comfort of the train.

As for driving: the weather was off-and-on rainy, sometimes heavily so, but we didn’t have to drive in it. The scenery was gorgeous, and we both got to enjoy it because neither of us had to keep an eye on the road. And at the border crossing, while all the cars lined up to inch through the customs gates, our train simply slowed long enough to pick up a gang of customs officers, who then came to us to check our passports and collect our customs cards while we rolled merrily on down the tracks! Easy peasy.

When we weren’t coastline-gazing or snoozing, Jennifer read a book while I got some writing done (more easily done thanks to the power outlets in the seats, another feature I love about the train) — I did some blogging and started chipping away at a new chapbook project I had an idea for while visiting the Vancouver Art Museum. I also had an idea to do a photo series called “As Seen from the Train” — not terribly original, probably, but I’m a window-watcher and the scenes from the train are quite different than what you’d see out a car window or from a plane — so I took a ton of photos of the passing scenery. I’ll post those photos, as well as some from Vancouver, in a couple of future posts, so stay tuned.