A thousand sultry thank yous to everyone who helped make last night so memorable: Jeff, Bud, Ned, Kailey, Stephen, and Leona for performing your flappy lits; Alibi Jones for your exquisite singing; Pacific Standard for providing the space & sustenance; and of course all you beautiful people who attended. Let’s do this again in the Fall…
photos by Alibi Jones
Thursday, June 25, we return to Brooklyn’s Pacific Standard to celebrate the flight of our Summer 2015 issue with our 3rd reading. It’s gonna flap your face back to the Stone Age, and then to the Jazz Age, before finally dropping you into the Space Age so you can sleep it off at some dingy interplanetary motel.
Performers include Dr. M Leona Godin, Jeff Laughlin, Bud Smith, Kailey Tedesco, & Ned Thimmayya.
Coming soon in soft, pulpy paperback.
Stay tuned…
As 2014 has been careening through its homestretch, our Flappers have been even more prolific than usual, getting their work published across the internet like there won’t be a 2015.
Jeff Laughlin shared some things he’s learned this year in “The Year I Didn’t Belong” over at Triad City Beat.
Mari Ness’ “Offgrid” popped up at Three-Lobed Burning Eye.
Dusty Wallace’s “Flight of the Lonely” went up at Acidic Fiction.
Samantha Eliot Stier’s “Plugs” was inserted into The Writing Disorder.
Juliet Cook & j/j hastain collaborated on “Clots Push Over the Edge” for the latest issue of Stirring.
Alison McBain’s playfully absurd “Nothing For Sale” was featured at Saturday Night Reader.
Ed Ahern left his “Aftertaste” at New Pop Lit.
Anna Lea Jancewicz’s poem “Black Robin” nested at Spry Lit.
Cassandra de Alba’s poem “Tyra Banks in the Arctic Circle” strutted the runway at Glitter Mob.
Mila Jaroniec joined drDOCTOR for their year-end podcast.
Emily O’Neill’s poem “Proof” was included in the latest edition of Sundog Lit.
Natalia Theodoridou’s “The Ravens’ Sister” perched itself at The Kenyon Review Online.
J.E. Reich wrote about embracing the changing Jewish family for The Jewish Daily Forward.
Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s “Sleepers” went up at Fantastic Stories of the Imagination.
Julie C. Day’s “Faerie Medicine,” which initially appeared in FLAPPERHOUSE #2, was reprinted by Luna Station Quarterly.
“Meeting” is the pièce de résistance from Jeff Laughlin‘s yet-unpublished poetry collection “Life and Debt.” Also available in our Fall 2014 issue, “Meeting” is a screaming sigh from beneath the hefty weight of love, work, and death.
{ X }
I.
IT’S NOT THAT I DON’T BELIEVE IN LOVE,
only that I compare it to working.
The action item list reads identical:
–That careening of blood through
the walls of the heart marking the
time you did it right the first try.
That’s enough, just that one on the
list convinces me that nothing is
different, nothing is that moment
more than anything else could be.
II.
To clarify the following, too:
I have loved and lost and lived
a million lives. I have lived in
the margins– those college-ruled
maniacs trapped me there from
the start. And I will die there,
with no work grinding my bones
and no laborious thought in my
hawkish mind. I will die without
comfort or love, but not regret.
III.
Folly of endeavor, folly of light,
prayers for the uninitiated who
just learned to work. Folly of fall,
folly of man, a layer of ice upon
the next worker who mentions he
is on sick leave. Folly of summer,
folly of synergy, a weigher of soul
and reciprocity delivers the memos.
Folly of function, folly of form, we
are not ideas we speak into the void. Continue reading “Meeting” – Poetry by Jeff Laughlin
These past few weeks, our Flappers have been killing it all over the web with their literary weaponry:
Natalia Theodoridou’s fantastic short story “The Eleven Holy Numbers of the Mechanical Soul” was posted at Clarkesworld.
Nerve published J.E. Reich’s autobiographical essay “I Filmed a Sex Scene Before the Reddit Era.”
Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s poem “Kites” appeared in the “Summer Is Dead” issue of Goblin Fruit.
Joseph Tomaras spoke with Nick Mamatas about Joseph’s story “Thirty-Eight Observations on the Nature of the Self,” which is featured in the Phantasm Japan anthology.
Jeff Laughlin mused about sports on the radio for Triad City Beat.
Rebecca Ann Jordan spooked readers with her horror story “Collection” at Fiction Vortex.
Gigantic Sequins added Emily O’Neill’s poem “de Los Muertos” to their online archives.
Julie C. Day’s story “Ghost Bubbles” popped up at Bartleby Snopes.
J. Bradley recorded a reading of “A Love Poem as Written by Robert Rodriguez,” included in the first issue of Profane.
On October 1, 2013, I sent a few emails to some writers I know, asking if they’d be interested in contributing to a lit zine I wanted to launch– one that would combine surrealism, irreverence, darkness, and sensuality. This zine didn’t have a website or even a name at the time. And yet, Jeff Laughlin, Todd Pate, Lauren Seligman, & Cameron Suey all agreed to jump on board and contribute their fine work to this nameless, shapeless thing that had been frolicking around my brain-cocoon and itching to break free.
Without them, FLAPPERHOUSE would not be a real, throbbing entity one whole year later. I still can’t believe it’s flown as far as it has, and I’m beyond grateful for that. Here’s to a very flappy year, and many many more to come. A million thank yous to Jeff, Todd, Lauren, Cameron, and everyone else who has supported this freaky little critter along the way.
Love + Hugs,
JO’B
Holy Smoke! Our Flappers have been mighty prolific outside the Flapperhouse these past few weeks…
Joseph Tomaras’ sci-fi surveillance state story “Bonfires in Anacostia” appeared in the August issue of Clarkesworld.
Natalia Theodoridou has had a couple short stories published recently:“Wayward Sons” in Lakeside Circus and “That Tear Problem” at Kasma.
At Split Rock Review, Emily O’Neill has a poem partly inspired by the fantastic show Supernatural titled “Disguises for the Waxing Moon.”
Todd Pate blogged about his new gig with the North Dakota Museum of Art at El Jamberoo.
Aoibheann McCann’s “Premium Line” ran in issue 2 of The Incubator.
The cannibal-themed anthology edited by Dusty Wallace, “People Eating People,” is now for sale.
Mila Jaroniec’s “Desperate Strangers” was posted at Luna Luna.
Rebecca Ann Jordan’s “Gospel Of” was published in Infinite Science Fiction One.
Jeff Laughlin wrote on the loneliness of tennis in covering the Winston-Salem Open for Triad City Beat.
J.E. Reich wrote about how “We Never Notice Our Own Addictions” over at Medium.
Tom Stephan posted a sort of psychic detective tale, “Never Anything Useful,” on Jux.com.
Diana Clarke reviewed the documentary Kabbalah Me for the The Village Voice.
Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s “Tea With the Titans” appeared on NewMyths.com.
Our Fall 2014 issue is so wonderfully bizarre & freakishly beautiful it’ll make your cheeks quiver & explode. It begins with an Alternate Reality Game, ends with a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, and in between there’s pink slime, raving gods, naked alligator rides, regurgitated Raymond Carver, a bunch more fiction that’s too bizarre to summarize here, and some phenomenal poetry.
FLAPPERHOUSE #3 is no longer available for sale in digital (PDF) format
because it’s NOW AVAILABLE FOR FREE right here!
Just click the cover to enjoy…
including
“Human Child” – Brendan Byrne
“Blood Ties” – Diana Clarke
“Map of the Twentieth Century” – Samantha Duncan
“We Dream of Our Dead Pets” – Carl Fuerst
“Friday Night, Saturday Morning” – M.N. Hanson
“I Climb Down the Tree One-Handed and in Another Life,”
“Piney and Buoyant We Wave, Consecrate,”
“Ode to Joy,”
“Painstaking,” and
“This is the Shaky Phase”– Jessie Janeshek
“Chicken Sandwich” – Rebecca Ann Jordan
“Meeting” – Jeff Laughlin
“Buried Treasure” – Ashley Lister
“ARG” – Anthony Michael Morena
“reflect / refract,”
“Pentacost,”
“them bones,”
“Year of the Horse,”
and “Street Music” – Emily O’Neill
“Laundromat” – Smith Smith
“The Hole” – Samantha Eliot Stier
“We Call Her Mama” – Natalia Theodoridou
“Cold Duck” – Joseph Tomaras
“Just Another Evening” – Dusty Wallace
Jeff Laughlin‘s yet-unpublished poetry collection “Life and Debt” is a sad, sardonic howl of rational insanity from the trenches of 21st Century office drudgery. We were extremely lucky to have two poems from that collection in our Summer 2014 issue: “Lunch,” which we posted online back in July, and “The Workaday World,” which you can read below:
{ X }
DON’T LAMENT THE HORIZON’S AFFECTATION,
the sun only does its job every day.
Don’t forget the simpleton orators,
their brilliance has so little say.
Don’t dissuade a boss’s gentle import,
even if they have such brittle ways.
Don’t permeate your intelligence,
it will only give your hair some gray.
Don’t forget there’s little to work for,
you’ll never earn your needed play.
Don’t egress unless you’ve something more,
be penniless as you overstay.
{ X }
JEFF LAUGHLIN writes about the Bobcats Hornets forCreative Loafing Charlotte & about sports in general forTriad City Beat in Greensboro, NC. His 1st book of poetry, Drinking with British Architects, is riddled with mistakes but available free if you want it. His 2nd book is Alcoholics Are Sick People, and If you ask nicely, he’ll probably give that to you too. Contact Jeff on his seldom-used twitter (@beardsinc) or email him (repetitionisfailure @gmail.com). He likely needs a haircut.
FLAPPERHOUSE 