Melvin Podgorski is young, naïve, American - and a coffee fanatic. It’s this passion that leads him from his native Chicago to 1990s Glasgow to scout out the prospects for a US coffee franchise. Looking for an escape from his suffocatingly suburban parents and the tangled wreckage of a divorce, he finds himself floundering in an alien land of Glaswegian dialect and radical student politics. As he becomes increasingly entangled with one particularly charming local and her militant ex-boyfriend, his efforts to keep the past and the present separate are put to the test, and soon his old life in Chicago and his recently found freedom in Glasgow are set for an emotional and catastrophic collision
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Imbued with dark, mournful notes, dashes of warm humour and the bittersweet tang of learning the hard way, Javascotia combines a feel-good flavour with a deep substance.
When three monks from a Tibetan monastery visit, Walter Chamaran and his parents must make a choice. Walter is a five-year-old Sri Lankan-Canadian living in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia—a prodigy. Since the age of three, he’s been writing stories, and now he is far along in a draft of a novel about a dispossessed law professional in Brooklyn, NY, hellbent on proving that acclaimed indie filmmaker D.A. Chimister has stolen his intellectual property. The work in question: Love & Theft, soon to be new streaming series. Walter's advanced spiritual disposition has garnered attention around his mother's yoga studio.
“But I ask you,” says Bandat Agubunde, one of the monks, to Walter’s mother, “to consider this a matter of not only personal interest but dire pertinence to the international community. There are wars going on, climate change, innocent people incarcerated, women raped, young girls sold into prostitution, and countless other injustices. The world needs all the gurus, lamas, mullahs, and rabbis it can get. Surely you agree that the human race is in desperate need of enlightened leadership, from the new generation, perhaps even from your son?”
"Brecht and Weill’s works (e.g., The Threepenny Opera, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny) satirize capitalism, class systems, and bourgeois morality through exaggerated characters and grotesque scenarios. Obler’s satire of the literary world—agents, influencers, conspiracies of taste—performs a similar ideological critique. It’s not just lampooning; it’s exposing systems of control and complicity, using comedy as a scalpel.” –Donald Proffit
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On an island somewhere in the South Pacific, New York writer Benjamin Obler drafts a manuscript whose sale might financially support his family at home. But when a bottle washes ashore containing a some long-forgotten criticism Obler wrote and never published, his best laid plans dissolve like so much salt into water. Who sent this, and why? In it, he rebuts the arguments in an essay that enjoins people to judge others for their singular acts. No forgiveness, no gray areas, only judgement. A novel of ideas ensues, with Obler being injured by a shipment of his own work, deemed unpalatable in the literary climate of the late 20-teens. Only an end to his isolation brings him psychic relief.
omnibus (ˈɑmnɪbəs): 1 : a usually automotive public vehicle designed to carry a large number of passengers: BUS
2 : a book containing reprints of a number of works (as of a single author or on a single subject)
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In this mash-up of autofiction, essay, screenplay, and epistolary, writer Benjamin Obler goes "behind enemy lines" as a blue-stater in Republican territory where, in his in-law's basement, he campaigns editors at the APA to include Aspiring Writer Syndrome in the DSM-IV, as a recognized mental disorder. He writes homages to John Cheever's "Goodbye, My Brother" and "The Enormous Radio" but they are both shot through with pandemic buckshot. A bus tour across the landscape of his psyche takes readers to an park where monuments pay tribute to the inspirational and instructive men in the author's life.
Stories with No End
A Bosnian immigrant seeks acceptance through an act of charity. A Midwestern family grows and shrinks across decades, treating addiction through faith and silence. In upstate New York, a construction crew battles conflicting mandates in COVID’s first lockdown order. In Los Angeles, retributive violence feels justified to a call center employee because surveillance technology enables identifying the offender; but consequence isn’t monitored by door cameras. In Connecticut, a man’s fake identity affords him a life of ease, but loneliness and desire blow his cover. The social perils of Christmas threaten to shatter a St. Paul friendship.
“Passionate people cannot be counted on to act fairly, you understand.” So says the hostess of the gala being thrown one night in the warehouse district of Minneapolis in 2018. This experimental novel was written for NaNoWriMo in 2017 and agented in 2018. It features Narrative Branch Technology(™), not to be confused with Choose Your Adventure, the owners of which are litigious, allegedly. Narrative Branch Technology allows you, the reader, to choose which attendee of the gala wins the FAIR Award and cash stipend at the end of the story. No more suffering at the neglectful hands of media elites!
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Far from being a right-wing cultural critique, this work intends to pose questions about the role of media in our culture. Why does attention from media signal acceptance and inclusion? What, instead of media attention, could be awarded to the marginalized, to really create economic parity and understanding across class lines? The publishing industry is only indicted by suggestion. There may even be a celebration of sameness, across the many celebrated cultural differences we enjoy in America.
Circumspection is careful consideration of all circumstances and consequences. That’s what these pieces are. “Animals in the Yard” is primary among them, because it concerns the imagination—a preoccupation of mine. People with overactive imaginations know the hazards that daydreaming poses to professions, relationships, and well-being. And they know the richness it affords an otherwise staid life. In the title piece I’m dressing for work in the morning, gathering up those tokens of stature, the corporate ID badge on a lanyard, wallet, phone, keys, etc., when I look out the window to the yard below and leap into a flight of storybook fancy about the neighbor’s dog and a bunny. This moment speaks for the five-year span during which I wrote these pieces, while I worked full-time in publishing, first in Minneapolis, then in New York City.
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