I’m excited to announce that I’ll have a short story in the upcoming anthology A Punk Rock Future, from Zsenon Publishing. There’s a kickstarter for the book, with rewards including ebooks and paperbacks (obviously), as well as music from some of the authors in the anthology, a story critique from Erica Satifka, and a bunch more.
The anthology includes stories from Erica L. Satifka, Sarah Pinsker, Spencer Ellsworth, Margaret Killjoy, Izzy Wasserstein, Stewart C Baker, Michael Harris Cohen, Maria Haskins, Kurt Pankau, Zandra Renwick, Marie Vibbert, P.A. Cornell, Jennifer Lee Rossman, M. Lopes da Silva, R. K. Duncan, Steven Assarian, Dawn Vogel, Matt Bechtel, Josh Rountree, and Vaughan Stanger.
And, if the kickstarter campaign hits its stretch goals, there’ll be another open submissions period for some additional flash stories.
NB: I have no involvement in the kickstarter, whatsoever. I’m just mentioning it because I love everything about this anthology and want the kickstarter campaign to be a success.
My story is about a lot of things, but mostly it’s about how punk-rock is for everyone who wants it, everyone who finds it and feels like they’ve found some missing piece of themselves. It’s also a ‘fuck you’ to anyone who believes otherwise, anyone who tries to act as a gatekeeper.
I don’t know what kind of person I would be today if I never found punk, but it had a profound effect on me in my teenage years. The world-weary humour of NOFX, the saccharine love songs of The Ataris, Pennywise, Bad Religion, Blink 182 and The Offspring (hey, it was 1999 and everybody loved them), anarchy, DIY, compilation discs. It was Punk-O-Rama Vol. 4 that introduced me to Tom Waits. The same compilation introduced me to Refused and The Shape of Punk to Come, my first real taste of anti-capitalist sentiment, and an incredible album that still sounds as cutting-edge today as it did 20 years ago. That album set me down a path of vibrant, complex post-hardcore that still defines a big chunk of my listening today.
If I hadn’t found Refused I wouldn’t have ‘got’ These Arms Are Snakes. If I didn’t listen to These Arms Are Snakes I wouldn’t have written Killing Gravity. I can trace who I am and what I am today right back to punk-rock. That’s why I’m excited about this anthology.