Hello. My name is Joe Robb and I live on the south bank of Cincinnati.

I don’t know what you know about Cincinnati.

When I used to live in Boston, I met people from the East Coast or the West Coast who thought my hometown–the mighty metropolis on the coast of the Ohio–coasted through a flat sea of corn, and that it was a town, small and rural, full of twang. They were surprised by my accent, and to learn that my city was big, and ugly sometimes, but beautiful at other times, so seeped in odd history that when you step on the pavement of Cincinnati, stories leak up through the cracks in the asphalt and the smells of malted barley and pigflesh flood your nose.

Was that too much?

Cincinnati is the Queen City, The ‘Nati, The City of Seven Hills, The Beer Capitol of the World, and Porkopolis. Cincinnati is the birthplace of Roy Rogers, Bootsy Collins, Doris Day, Stephen Spielberg, Sarah Jessica Parker, and King Records, but not Jerry Springer, although he served on our city council from 1971 until 1974 when he resigned, admitting he had hired a prostitute with a personal check . . . that bounced. The... more »

Greetings, fellow Fringers.  Three events have occurred in the past seven days which have made my world just that little bit tastier.  Being the charitable little soul I am, I feel it necessary to lay my learnings upon you.

The first event took the form of a teeny tiny snippet of a workshop, where in groups of three we were urged to fashion a collective tale and then spend three minutes apiece contributing to a third of three variations of our chosen theme (there’s a more straightforward way of explaining that, but I feel it necessary to emphasise the thrice nature of proceedings).  I was thrilled to discover that, when pressed, I can churn out some reasonably not-too-shabby words.  It was also marvellous fun.  And besides, it’s always nice to break out from the tedium of lone scribbler absorption and mingle with some writerly types and discover that, contrary to what others (ie, me) might suggest, they’re not all affected twats.

My second motivational titbit was less exciting, but useful nonetheless; having run out of things to read in my lunch break, I took to drafting a new but less zippy version of the shared story from the night before.  I’m hoping... more »

Hi all. Remember me? I’ll forgive you if you don’t. It’s been a while. It’s not like I fell out of a tree or anything. I got laid off and had to scramble to find a paid gig. I’ll tell you about the troubled California economy another day. Right now I’m I introducing SAVE.

How many people does it take to reach Anthony Bourdain?
One, if you’re me and you know how to find him.

How many people does it take to reach America’s writers? To be exact, the specific subset of writers that attended Vassar College? I don’t know. That’s where you folk come in. (FYI, Bourdain attended but did not graduate)

Currently, due to budget cuts, the creative writing program at Vassar is facing severe budget cuts. If passed they threaten to undermine the integrity of the creative writing program.

To follow the fight against these cuts and find out how you can help visit SAVE Creative Writing

For the first time today I attended the monthly Silverfish Books fiction forum, a group that is advertised as an opportunity for fiction writers to share their work. There were 17 people at the forum but only three people were reading their work, and most of the other people present seemed to be also writers and not just friends dragged along for the writers’ moral support. The levels of experience with writing varied from contest winners and those with a first book to novices who’d yet to volunteer to share their work.

There was no announcement of etiquette except that the moderator stressed that we were there to discuss “storytelling” and not “editing,” which ruffled my feathers a bit because telling a good story isn’t only plot, but also language. One control over our not discussing sentence level was that people didn’t bring copies so we couldn’t see the stories for ourselves. Anyway, the general process was that someone read a story, then we commented on it while the writer more or less sat in silence, which is typical of most workshops. What was different is that we bypassed the cursory positive comments before cutting our teeth on constructive criticism.... more »