The TothWorld Podcast

A revamped TothWorld Podcast. Distorted sounds for disoriented minds.

It's Prozac Paxil Cymbalta Effexor Zoloft time. Take 'em while you got 'em and chill to the sounds of the empire falling.  It's all over now, blue babies.

This week, we check in with TothWorld favorite Jesse Loren.  Jesse is co-editor of Bombshells: War Stories and Poems by Women on the Homefront 2007 and is an MFA graduate of UNO.  She is also co-editor of Mourning Sickness which will be released in May and available at spdbooks.org or amazon.com.  Her poetry can be found in Octaves, Kingly Blue, The New Virginia Review, Yawp, and Ellipsis. Jesse writes an editorial column and doesn't kill spiders.

Toth's novel #3, Finale, is finally on schedule for publication in 2009.

This week's guest is Lina Ramona Vitkauskas.  She has an M.A. in Creative Writing from Wright State University, is co-editor of online literary/visual arts magazine, milk, and contributing editor to UniVerse: A United Nations of Poetry (Lithuania). She is the author of THE RANGE OF YOUR AMAZING NOTHING (Ravenna Press, 2008), Failed Star Spawns Planet/Star (dancing girl press, 2006), and Shooting Dead Films with Poets (Fractal Edge Press, 2004). She has been published in the 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets (Outside Voices, Ed. Jessica Smith), The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (Cracked Slab Books, 2007); The Prague Literary Review, The Chicago Review, White Fungus (New Zealand), Aufgabe, Moria, MiPoesias, PFS Post, Seven Corners, LocusPoint, Van Gogh's Ear (Paris), Rampike (University of Windsor), Paper Tiger (Australia), In Posse Review Multi-Ethnic Anthology (Ilya Kaminsky, editor), The Mississippi Review, The Wisconsin Review, Lituanus (Lithuanian Quarterly Journal), and many others.

She won an Honorable Mention in the STORY Magazine's 1999 Carson McCullers Award contest and was a semi-finalist in the 2002 Cleveland State University Open Poetry Series. She has read at various venues all over Chicago and the Midwest including The School of the Art Institute (Chicago), The Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture, Northwestern University, Around the Coyote Arts Festival, Quimby's, Woman Made Gallery, Myopic Books, Woodland Pattern Bookstore, Indiana University-Northwest, North Park University, Lewis University, and Santara-Sveisa Lithuanian Arts, Literature, and Political Conference. Upcoming work will be featured in Blossombones, Another Chicago Magazine, and Arabesques (Algeria). Click here to visit her website.

Guests: Dave and Lillian Brummet. Their websites include:

Main Website
Talk Radio Show
MySpace Site

Also, new music and the ressurrection of Additive Headlines.

I finally reveal my true identity: the Jesus Christ of anger. Also featured: the corpse of E.E. Cummings, plus music and other poems.

Goodbye to the U.S.A., plus dead author Robert Frost.

This week's guest is author Gabriel Ogrease, with a very interesting piece and equally interesting commentary. The show also features one diatribe, several turtle doves, and plenty of quasi-music.

A tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr., with a special piece by Brian Douthit, author, editor, reviewer, and digital artist. He has written book reviews for ForeWord Magazine and writes music and book reviews independently. His contacts with both musicians and poets led him to produce audio pieces for The Public Radio Exchange (PRX), a nonprofit service for distribution, peer review, and licensing of radio pieces for public radio. Although he no longer broadcasts on his radio station, Brian continues to write reviews for audio pieces for PRX. Currently, Brian is creating video reviews for books in an innovative format he calls "Haiku Video Reviews" - an entire book review narrowed down to the seventeen syllables of a Haiku. He is also working on his own CD album of New Age music and is planning on releasing a new book in 2008.

Back with Steven Mayoff, only this time in the guise of his alter ego, Mojomatic.  The Mojomatic songs featured: Trance-Sylvania; God Is Alive; Highway 61 Revisited.

Also, more of the usual hijinks and jinxes.

The Confessions of Paul A. Toth, Part II (with only a pinch of madness).

 

Yes, we all have to learn our lessons and then...

Forget them
Relearn them
Forget them
Relearn them
Forget them
Relearn them
Forget them
Relearn them
Forget them
Relearn them
Forget them
Relearn them
Forget them
Relearn them
Forget them
Relearn them
Forget them
Relearn them

This week's show includes a fabulous audio presentation by Jesse Loren, an MFA graduate of UNO. She studies poetry, gardens, and teaches high school journalism.  Jesse is co-editor of Bombshells: War Stories and Poems by Women on the Homefront. Since 2005 she has had a deep relationship with an Infantry medic and purple heart vet who is the subject of one of her two pieces, You Will Be Measured. The other is entitled What Babies Really Do. Looking to please the king of TothWorld? Listen to these pieces.

Additionally, let it be known that I will soon resume phone recorded readings. First, I must have a tooth removed or, apparently, half my face sawed off. For those of you who responded to the Poets and Writers (home of the world's most pretentious bio photos) classified ad, and couldn't handle recording yourselves, I'll be getting back to you in the order in which I find your original emails.

Finally, cheer up: The world can't get any better.

This week's show is a tribute to "writer's writer" (read: unread) Stanley Elkin, the unsung John Coltrane of the novel. Also included: a collaboration between Scott Schroen of Ugly Radio Rebellion and myself.

This week's guest is author Greggory Moore, a lifelong SoCal resident who lives in Long Beach.

Also included is a special project from Scott Schroen of Ugly Radio Rebellion.

Plus, plenty more non-narcotic fun.

"Enjoy" the following works:

1. Cluster Spores
2. Paris, Florida
3. Sand Dollars
4. Time Bomb
5. Repetition I Like
6. Bring on the Culture War

And remember, we cannot "is." We're in flux, oscillating. And if that sounds pretentious, pretentious is just another word for nothing left to gain.

Yes, it's Toth on the loose in this special Rant Edition.

This week's guest is Frank Zappa tribute band Ugly Radio Rebellion, with more pyrotechnics than a mis-built meth lab.

Also included is more evidence of your host's rise, decline, decline, rise, rise, decline, decline, decline, rise, decline, rise, and --

Laurie Frankel of LauriesLoveLogic.com returns for part two and the conclusion of her saga. Meanwhile, your host continues -- whatever it is he does. Listen for yourself and "enjoy."

Part 1 of 2 from Laurie Frankel's serialized contribution.  Published book author, literary writer and humorist, Laurie knows pain is the root of all comedy and is thrilled her life is so damn funny! Her work has appeared in The Pedestal Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly and she was twice a finalist for Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Award. Her book, It’s Not Me, It’s YOU! has been translated and is now in its third printing. This former east coast gal can be found saving the human race one love question at a time at LauriesLoveLogic.com.

This week's guest, Kerry Langan, is a short fiction author living in Oberlin, Ohio.  She has published more than three dozen short stories in literary  magazines published in the United States, Canada and Hong Kong.  Her work has appeared in American Literary Review, Story Quarterly, Cimarron Review, The Seattle Review, Phantasmagoria, Thema, Other Voices, and other publications.  Her non-fiction has appeared in Working Mother.  A selection of her published fiction appears at this site. Her short story, "Memphis, Tennessee," was originally published in Rosebud but was re-published in the online journal, Literary Mama.

You can also hear my poem, Lunar Mission, as well as these songs and in this order: Rearview Mirror; Mother is the Necessity of Invention; Watershed; and Take It All. And you who've taken it all know who you are.

This could be about the president, but it isn't. A TothWorld "Labor Day" (gee, thanks, that makes up for everything) Special.

Find out everything there is to know about my new home, Sanibel, Florida, on my newest show, The Sanibel Podcast, and go here to listen to the first show.

I Am a Tire and other surprises.

The robot returns.

Submissions sought. Authors with fiction or poetry published in online or print journals welcome. See this page for recording tips. Send a ten to fifteen minute recording as an .mp3 attachment to tothnews@aol.com with a bio as you would like to be introduced in the body of the message. Then, send a separate email with a photo (the larger and more square, the better) attached, or include a link to one. 

The TothWorld Robot is back as I wait for the Sopranos (Nationwide Moving -- do NOT hire no matter what the bid) to deliver my recording equipment.

The TothWorld Robot reads two poems and introduces a song in lieu of my equipment arriving here in Sanibel, Florida.

This week's guest is Michelle Miller is a writer, poet and academic currently living in small-town Ontario. Come August she will be moving to Vancouver, where she will be attending the prestigious Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at UBC. She has had poetry, fiction and non-fiction published in many local literary reviews, as well as The Danforth Review and Black Heart Magazine. One critic has praised Michelle as being "Like the London Anais Nin, only more crass, or Marguerite Duras with cuss words or a more literary version of mid-period Madonna without the bad electro background and udo kier cameos," which Michelle takes as a mighty set of compliments. Please feel free to creep her on the internet at this site.

Also featured are the songs I'm Okay, I'm Okay, Everyone's a Killer, The World Revolves Around Me, There's No Feeling for this Word, and the poem You've Got to Move, Child.

This week's show features several songs, a poem, and guest reader Leslie Wolter. Leslie is an English instructor and English Specialist at the East St. Louis campus of Southwestern Illinois College. Her work has appeared in a variety of online and print sources, including Eclectica, Great Works, River Walk Journal, Prose Toad, and Miranda Literary Journal. She can be emailed here.

Prepare your ears for some massive volume variation due to audio problems beyond my control or, more accurately, understanding. Keep that finger on the volume button.

This show includes my poem and accompanying song Air and Weight and One Day Old, the song Sheltering the Sky Beneath Me, a second poem entitled Dissonance Reduction, and, finally, the song I like Candlelit Beaches and Long Walks on the Dinner Table.

Heather Fowler received her M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University in May of 1997. She has published short stories in the following journals: See You Next Tuesday (2006), Frigg: A Magazine of Fiction and Poetry (Winter 2006), The Muse Apprentice Guild (October 2002), Artisan, a Journal of Craft (September 2002), Literary PotPourri (May 2002), Exquisite Corpse (Summer 2001), The Barcelona Review (May, 2001), Quercus Review (May, 2001), Penumbra (May 2001), B & A New Fiction (Jan. 2001), Barbaric Yawp (Dec. 2000), Zoetrope All-Story Extra ( June 2001, October and December 1999), Mindkites (December 1999, and June 2000). She worked as a Guest Editor for Zoetrope All-Story Extra in March and April of 2000. Her story "Slut" won third prize at the 2000 California Writer's Conference in Monterey.

Her poetry has been published in various venues including: the Map of Austin Poetry, The Coast Highway Review, The Driftwood Highway 1999 Anthology, Joe's Journal, Best of the Beach 1998, The Publication, and The Cityworks Literary Anthology, Volume 6. She is currently working on writing a second novel entitled Sex Angel, editing and compiling four books of short stories, and querying two screenplays and assorted other projects. Please feel free to email her. And check out her Myspace site here.

These week's guest is Jeff Markowitz, whose novels include Who is Killing Doah's Deer? and A Minor Case of Murder. See Jeff's blog here. Also, hear the story of my medical mystery, as well as the songs Sagital Cut, There Goes the Sun, the poem Mind Bowling, and, finally, the song If I Am What You Say I Am, Then... Download the show here.

Organia: Eight Poems, Eight Videos and Eight Songs. $11.00 including shipping and handling. Order here. For a sneak preview, right-click this link and save file to desktop.

And...we're back.

Look forward to the songs Clouds Moving Fast Over a Plain, Collateral Circulation and Unsent Letter to Bill Frisell, as well as my poem Personal Computer.

Also, don't forget to buy my novels, the profits of which will go towards purchasing several cells of an unspecified organ.

This week's guest, Libby Fischer Hellman, writes the award-winning suspense series featuring video producer and single mother Ellie Foreman, who gets by with a wry sense of humor, a circle of good friends, and an occasional bottle of wine. Originally from Washington, D.C., Libby has lived in Chicago for 30 years and finds the contrast between the beautiful and the profane in that city a crime writer's paradise. Next up is Chicago Blues,a dark crime fiction anthology she's editing, which will be released in October by Bleak House Books (also my current my publisher). She also will be releasing a stand-alone PI novel some time in 2008 called Easy Innocence. Visit her website here.

This week's show includes the songs Get Lost, Nothing Left to Do, and a cover of Gang of Four's 5:15. Also included is my poem Variations on a Conclusion in C Minor.

This week's guest is Ayn Amorelli, a published sexy-romance writer of four books (with another on the way) who also writes gothics using the pen name of Ayn Hunt. Ms. Amorelli can be found in Hunt's Corner, hosting a writing chat, every Sunday at 8:00 p.m. EST in AOL's Chapter One chat room.  Excerpts of all her books can be found at her Ayn Hunt site site and Ayn Amorelli site.

Podcast #91 features a tribute to Georges Bataille, the songs The Knowable Truth and Raindogs, and my poem So You Want to Be a God? Also, a very special and fizzy surprise.

This week's guest is Ursula Pflug, author of the novel, Green Music. (Tesseract Books,2002) Born in Tunis, she attended the Ontario College of Art and the University of Toronto after traveling widely. An internationally published, award winning short story writer, Pflug has published over fifty stories in journals and anthologies including Leviathan1 and 4, Album Zutique, The Nine Muses, On Spec, Now Magazine, Quarry, Herizons, The Best Of Strange Horizons, The Best of Leviathan and Album Zutique and many more. She writes about books regularly for The Peterborough Examiner, the New York Review of Science Fiction and other publications. Her experience in professional theatre includes several productions of her plays, either solo-authored or collectively written. Recipient of an Ontario Arts Council Works In Progress Award in 2005 to complete her new novel, Thin Wednesday, Pflug was short-listed for the KM Hunter Award the following year. She received a Canada Council grant in the current year for a novel length flash fiction project, in which each chapter will be precisely 500 words long. She teaches short fiction via the Continuing Education Program of Loyalist College. Her bibliography is posted on the ISFDB database.  See her Myspace site here.

This week includes the beginning of a blitzkrieg campaign to save my novel Fizz from undeserved obscurity. My other contribution is a tribute to my adolescent and adult psychiatrists, Talking Heads.

This week's guests are the band Foyl and Tamara Williams-Przyjazna. Williams-Przyjazna is an accomplished actress, classically-trained musician, poet, and mother of daughter Gwendolyn, also known as Nugget. Her piece is entitled Travelogue. Foyl is an acoustic-based rock band featuring Paul Michael Audi, Robert Fiets, Brandon Hoffman, and Bob Hull. Their production company is Pavlov's Cellar Productions. Feel free to email the band. The two songs Foyl plays are What Is and Should Never Be and Half-Life.

This week's guest, Wolf Larsen, is an adventurer, writer, and poet who traveled through 45 countries in Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Wolf has lived in Chicago, Wisconsin, New York City, Honduras, Brazil, Peru, and India. He worked for nearly twelve years as a seasonal laborer in Alaska. Wolf has written five novels, six collections of poetry, a play, a screenplay, a monologue, a multimedia work, a collection of short stories, and a 70,000 word run-on sentence. He has been published in literary magazines around the world. After you hear his poem, I think you, like I did, will say, "Wow." Click here to visit his website.

The show also features my poem Gastronomy (since revised), plus the songs Junk is No Good Baby, Prodigal Son and Off the Coast of California.

My guest this week, Steven Mayoff, is a writer living on Prince Edward Island, Canada. His work has appeared in various Canadian magazines such as the the Windsor Review, Grain, Filling Station, Parchment, Pottersfield Portfolio, All Rights Reserved, Grimm Magazine, the Malahat Review and the Puritan, as well as Terrain.org (USA), the Dublin Quarterly (Ireland) and the Arabesques Review (Algeria). If I do say so myself, it appears good company shares good places. The piece Steven reads originally appeared in Pottersfield Portfolio (Nova Scotia) 2003. See his website here.

This show also includes the songs No One Receiving and Clocks, as well as a poem/song in the form of one of my monthly additive headline experiments, which may be read at The 2nd Hand.

This week's guest, Nathan Leslie, was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota and grew up in Ellicott City, Maryland.  Nathan Leslie’s five collections of short fiction include Believers (Pocol Press, 2006), Reverse Negative (Ravenna Press, 2006), and Drivers (Hamilton Stone Editions, 2005).  Leslie’s work has appeared in over 100 literary magazines including Boulevard, Shenandoah, South Carolina Review, North American Review, and Cimarron Review.  He is fiction editor for The Pedestal Magazine and of The Potomac, and his book reviews and articles have been published in newspapers such as The Washington Post, The Kansas City Star, and The Orlando Sentinel. His reading includes pieces from Reverse Negative and Drivers, as well as his story The Coloring Book. Visit his website here.

Also featured are the songs Leave Me Alone and I Am Drugs, along with the poem/song You Make Me Feel Like Chet Baker, the Later Years.

Now audible!

The file has been repaired. If you've already downloaded the original version, hit reload/refresh before saving the file.

This week's guest, Benjamin M. LeRoy, is the publisher of Bleak House Books.  Read his blog here.  I engage the guest in an interview of great interest to writers and readers alike, since Ben is both a publisher and writer.

This week's show also features the songs Ghetto Defendant and We're So Free, along with my poem Truck Bumper US-23.

After graduating with an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Windsor, Dean Serravalle has published stories in The Dalhousie Review, Lichen Literary Arts Preview, The Arabesques Review, Zygote, The Canadian Ethnic Studies Journal, Versal, Urban Graffiti, Sputnik, Dime, In Posse Review, and The Del Sol Review.  Most recently, one of his stories was nominated for the prestigious Journey Prize in Canada. At present, he is soliciting publishers for his first collection of short stories entitled After The Last Dance, a novella entitled E-pill, and a first novel entitled Reliving Charley. Dean teaches secondary school English in Niagara Falls.

This show also includes a bit from a blog, an Eno cover, and the song Peachy Keen.