If you're going to write about drugs, please stop. If you're going to write about a wedding, please stop. Stop writing about how weird it is to be gay. It's not weird anymore. Please do not write in hip-hop language. Don't write about porn. We already have enough of that in our lives and we all beat off a much as you do, so it's no biggie. Don't try to "write what you know." You don't know anything. Me either.

If you have to write about drugs, don't write about pot. Candy is more interesting than pot is. Knives are almost always cool. Accidents are good, but not car ones, unless everybody in the book is dead or dies at once. If there is lace of any kind in your writing, you are doomed. Don't write about Europe. You were there with a backpack for a week and barely scratched the surface. This does not permit you to have a character called Giuseppe. Do not open up your story with Bob Seger or John Mellencamp lyrics. Stephen King did that shit to me once when I was small and I'm still recovering.

Mental institutions are a dealbreaker. You can have an institution on your street or near your school but you can't be in one anymore. It sucks, I know. If you write by hand, write with the hand you don't favor. If you write by computer, and the room has a window, sit by that, and don't look out it. Ignore or be rude to the people you love. Then try to make up for it.

Don't try to surprise me unless you surprised yourself. Write a book that will make me want to keep reading it rather than getting head. I can think of 10. Font is important, both while you are typing the words, and when it is printed in the book. When you think you are about to write something really good, go to the grocery. Chekov's idea that "if a gun is on the mantle in the first act it should go off in the last" has done more damage than any other single sentence in writing. Objects are not road signs. Action in a book should not occur as if Keanu Reeves was in charge.

I'm still waiting to read a really good scene about somebody getting their ears pierced. It can be done. Never have children. Study story. Realize you cannot win. Repeat. If you've ever thought about Star Wars or mentioned Star Wars in conversation, or own anything related to Star Wars, or have seen Star Wars, don't write. Oh sweet, you went to that museum alone one day and had a tuna sandwich in the cafe? You're killing me, please. The subway, huh? If you listen to the Beatles or Radiohead, or Jay-Z, don't write. If you ever put up devil's horns with your hand at shows, don't write. You're probably in bad shape if you mention whiskey or a beach. Don't say "story" or "poem."

Mothers are better for characters to have than girlfriends. Ditto fathers/boyfriends. If the mother is the girlfriend or the boyfriend, I hope your story isn't minimalist or narrative. Abstractions and dreams are good.* *Unless your dream is about building a tree-house out of honey and glue with your brother who isn't really your brother but that Brad Renfro guy who died in Hollywood but nobody noticed and the tree-house turns into a bar then a candle then a city. We've all had that dream or something equally as underwhelming.

Write less dialogue, unless you are really good at it, which I guarantee you aren't. You're probably in pretty bad shape if you mention any website whatsoever or even a computer for that matter. When was the last time you ate at an Arbys? If it was more than a year you probably can't say anything I need to know. The cute fat Mexican at the bodega and his family who you think you're such good friends with probably live a much different life than you expect. Maybe don't start messing around in there.

Are you writing about someone taking a drag off of a cigarette? You might as well be saying, "He breathed." Don't write about skin unless it's going bad. Acne is always a choice subject. The shame and embarrassment that comes with terrible skin can be a goldmine. I'm talking Acne Vulgaris too, not a goddamn blackhead on your chin. Don't conceive of your "central" characters by defining them with a mental or physical "condition." If you're going to tell me about your Mom, do it from your dad's point of view. I want to know what she's like in the sack.

Don't connect with me. Don't try to pretend I'm not there. Don't try to be funny. You are or you aren't. Or the sentence is or isn't. You are neither David Lynch nor Captain Beefheart. You might be Cher. Cry more, but don't tell anybody either. This is the way crying is like rap. I used to say you can't write about serial killers, but they work sometimes, if they are described in the way one would a washcloth or a doll. Remember your asshole is a tunnel.

If you've ever read Bukowski, please stop. Please, God, no characters who are musicians. There is nothing worse than trying to describe music, or how someone plays it. Leave music to douchebags. Stop writing about rich literary boys in college. I hated you people when I was in college and I still hate you. Your frat took a shit on my porch.

Drink some water. Do not write about writing. Have you ever seen a painting of a person painting? No? Well, it sucks. If you've ever told someone they are "misreading" a philosopher, eat a cock. You are not Andy Warhol. You probably don't really listen to black metal. Can I reiterate the one about not writing about musicians?

If you are more aware of your own dick or vagina than you are of what your breath sounds like when you are asleep, please go get a job in marketing instead. The guy who lives upstairs from you is probably really cool. You should introduce yourself instead of imagining him doing weird shit with hooks and rope all the time and then writing it down. Get a hold of yourself, the guy's probably just playing Wii.

Oooh, prostitutes. So you're into that. Awesome. I'd rather hear from them about you.

If there's never been a book that made you not want to leave the house again, don't try to make your own. Stop being in bars all the time. Man in Bar = Man in Life. We know. If you're angry, go outside. Please do not put words into things. Not to keep the anger away, but to keep the Rage Against The Machine out of my ears. Own your advice in the same way you once tried to suck your own dick. By that I mean: everything is true.

If my cousins on my dad's side of the family know who you are, or feel interested in reading your book when told what it's about, you might be dying. Any critique of the social or emotional will go unnoticed. Pity. If you can separate the words and the story: trash. The word "lovers" always fails on some level. Don't just kill your idols; leave them in history. Avoid L.A. and New York altogether. If you lived in either of those cities, you would have given up writing by now anyway. I don't believe you.

Have you ever printed out your manuscript and bathed in it? Right answers are for those who hope. Tone belongs to music while deafness is holy. If you or the people in your writing have bought new clothes in the past two years, it's over. If you can point out "Action" in a book, why isn't it a movie? Don't write about America or Bush or Arabs. Don't write about the future. Don't write about endings. Probably don't write anything at all.

We published 17 things in 2021

Ghosts by Brad Phillips The Dog by Stacey Levine two stories by Willy Miwa Genesis by Lily Arnell I'm Not Here to Commit Any Crimes by Zac Smith Rainbow by Precious Okoyomon Omens, Portents, Comets by Jon Lindsey three poems from l-theanine by Willis Plummer Holding Your Breath So You Don't Have to Breathe So Much Sometimes by Zac Smith Giancarlo DiTrapano (1974-2021) by various PCP by Anna Dorn I Feel Like My Own Life Would Be Better and All of Their Lives Would Also Be Better by Clancy Martin The Last Time I Saw My Father by Elizabeth Ellen The Jealous Type by Aoko Matsuda Drainstoppers by Natalya Malick What It Was Like, What Happened, & What It's Like Now by Brad Phillips The Swan by Lily Arnell

Another one gone

Giancarlo DiTrapano has died. It’s strange to think that a conversation can end mid-sentence. I had been messaging with Gian recently, first about his friend Paolo Valerio who was trying to publish a book on femminielli/third gender folx in Neapolitan culture, then about the byzantine jure sanguinis law that allows people to apply for Italian citizenship through an unbroken bloodline, which Gian did, which I am trying to do—he had recently given me the contact information of the lawyer his brother hired to take care of the process. “Maybe she will give you a discount if you tell her I referred you! I will email her now.” How fucking stupid that our last exchange was about bureaucracy & taxes. What a waste of precious life, of scarce time—but Gian was just such a generous guy, maternal even, in a gay daddy kind of way.

I met Gian when he was rolling through town to accept a PEN Award for Atticus Lish. Lily was crashing with me & they had gone on a molly bender all night while he was cruising Grindr or whatever app he was using to hook up with bears—“I swear I saw a guy I hooked up with in Providence when I left my own reading to go fuck him.” All night on the prowl, smoking cigarettes inside the hotel room while tweaking about the acceptance speech he hadn’t written yet. The next day I was conscripted to help him find drugs to stay awake for the award ceremony, to get back “up” after the inevitable MDMA crash. Did we meet in the parking lot near my house? The award ceremony didn’t go well. He was either never let in or kicked out—didn’t matter anyway, fuck those literary establishment people. He was all humor & irreverence & love for the writers he felt in his bones were the “real deal,” he fucking believed in Atticus’s Preparation for the Next Life. He believed in the good shit. When I met Atticus (at a PEN festival, of course), all I could think about was the way Gian gushed about him, that I was in the presence of an otherworldly genius.

It was summer 2016 when I really got to spend time with Gian. Dear Gian, this is Lily’s friend Jackie. We met that one time in Boston when you were trying to find drugs. We are coming to Italy. He was living in a bare & bombed-out apartment in the center of Rome, down the street from the Bernini statue of the ecstasy of Saint Teresa, with his delightful husband Giuseppe, a jolly aesthete who made costumes for operas. There was almost no furniture in the place. It had a shabby gothic feel, like it had been abandoned years ago by an esoteric sex cult. “I don’t have a bed. You can come, but where will the three of you sleep?” He bought a bed for us. I had passed through Rome multiple times, first just with my Russian mathematician boyfriend Mitya, then again with Mitya & Lily. The guest room where we stayed was the red of a womb with the fan & bed he bought for our stay. We roamed those streets all night, intoxicated, the streets completely empty save for the couple fucking outside the pantheon, or the couple breaking up by the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi in the Piazza Navona—we walked to Parco del Gianicolo to watch the sun rise over Rome, waiting for the light to break & blaze & blast beams over thousands of years of sedimented history, the ruins of the Roman forum & the colosseum bathed in pink light—we stood silently on the terrace, contemplating the time congealed in all those monuments, gobsmacked by the epic vista. When day had fully broken we continued our trek, past the equestrian statue of Garibaldi with a single pigeon shitting on his head, & toward the Vatican, which, at that ungodly hour, was completely empty. We roamed the Vatican in an eerie calm & as we crossed Piazza San Pietro, we could see, in the distance, the crowds of tourists descending, like an ominous tidal wave inching toward St Peter’s square.

While staying with Gian in Rome I got the impression that Giuseppe had tempered his drug binges, though I vaguely remember accompanying him on a late-night mission to score blow. We stopped at a bar that an old mafiosa guy was shutting down & ended up hanging there all night while the man teased me & my beau & Gian told me wild stories of losing his virginity to the man when he was a teen on exchange in Italy. “Can you believe it? This guy initiated me”—spoken like it was the best thing in the universe. Always that sense of awe. Tender love for the freaks & the perverts of the world. & how lovingly he spoke of Giuseppe. When I asked Gian to recommend me a place to get pizza in Napoli (our next stop) he wrote down a spot while gushing about how divine it was to see Giuseppe eat multiple double mozzarella di bufala Neapolitan pies at this joint.

I guess I became an Italophile on that trip. It’s hard for me to imagine Italy without Gian in it. It’s hard to imagine that the next time I go he won’t be there. His house was full of plastic bottles of delicious olive oil that had been pressed from olives that grew on his family’s estate in southern Italy. His fridge was full of psychedelic research chemicals that he used to treat his debilitating cluster headaches, so painful they are often referred to as “suicide headaches.” We talked about it for a long time. How much pain he was in. How much discovering the treatment changed everything. “It saved my life.” The statement now sounds hauntingly premature.

“Any writer worth a fuck should be in the business of killing lies. Regardless of what fictions must be made up, the art of writing is about killing lies. It is a kind of war and, being that, it may consume you, or it may make you sick...”

Nico Walker on the death of Giancarlo DiTrapano

“Grief over a mentor, not a friend, is parasocial at best. It feels performative, untrue, like a mockingbird making its home in a blackbird’s nest. When there was the opportunity for friendship after all, it feels worse.”

When our writing mentor, instructor, and in some cases friend Giancarlo DiTrapano died suddenly this spring, my fellow MTVM alumni Cory Bennet and Mila Jaroniec asked Giacomo at Neutral Spaces if we could publish an issue in his memory. I’m honored to have the piece linked here published beside such lovely remembrances.

I put together some stuff regarding Gian DiTrapano - might add a few links here too. A fun one I found last week was Gian with Dave Hill talking about a priestly encounter, which resulted for me in a fun wet dream.

Scott was quoted in Gian’s obituary. He was a friend and he will be missed.

How can we entrust our literature to international corporations? Is this not obviously insane?

Christian Lorentzen, On Giancarlo DiTrapano, 1974 to 2021

Sonntag, 04.04.2021

PUBLISHING WATER

Bei herrlicher Morgensonne, gestern, lese ich: Giancarlo DiTrapano, founder and publisher of Tyrant Books, New York, has died. He was 47. Jede Todesmeldung a piece of realist writing. Grade bin ich noch in ausgedehnter McClanahan-Lektüre, stirbt auf einmal, im Schlaf, wie es heißt, dieser interessante Mann, Verleger, Initiator, ebenfalls aus West Virginia, wie McClanahan, und doch weiß ich wenig über ihn, ein paar Interviews, aber was muss man da schon groß wissen. Mir wäre lieber, andere würden stattdessen sterben.

Im Vogelhaus meiner Eltern ist die Hölle los. Jetzt kommen schon Tauben und picken die Reste von der Wiese. Meine Mutter ist schon einen Tag vorher aufgeregt, wenn ich zu Besuch komme. Eben fragte sie mich, ob meine “Ex” sich nochmal gemeldet habe. Ich sagte, nein. Und: “So sind die jungen Leute heute”. Sie schüttelt mit dem Kopf. Sie versteht die Menschen oft nicht. Mir geht es genauso. Menschen haben Gründe, dachte ich dann. Aber Gründe sind meist nicht viel besser als der ganze random Scheiß, sie sind lediglich verbalisierte Randomness. Weiße Löcher klaffen im Himmel.

Giancarlo DiTrapano, Defiantly Independent Book Publisher, Dies at 47

Giancarlo DiTrapano, Defiantly Independent Book Publisher, Dies at 47

In 2016 Mr. DiTrapano edited “Cherry,” an autobiographical novel by Nico Walker, which was later adapted into a movie starring Tom Holland, released this year. “Cherry” tells the story of a traumatized Iraq combat medic who develops a heroin addiction and starts robbing banks after his return to civilian life. Mr. Walker worked with Mr. DiTrapano while in prison, communicating via email on a…

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By BY ALEX VADUKUL from Books in the New York Times-https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/15/books/giancarlo-ditrapano-dead.html?partner=IFTTT Mr. DiTrapano championed avant-garde work and relished taking chances on young, untested authors. His Tyrant Books produced some unexpected hits. Giancarlo DiTrapano, Defiantly Independent Book Publisher, Dies at 47 New York Times

"Giancarlo DiTrapano, Defiantly Independent Book Publisher, Dies at 47" by BY ALEX VADUKUL via NYT Books https://ift.tt/3ag8cHn

"Giancarlo DiTrapano, Defiantly Independent Book Publisher, Dies at 47" by Alex Vadukul via NYT Books https://ift.tt/3ag8cHn