NEWS!
Yes: An entertaining short story we ran at our main site a few summers ago, “We Love You, Ringo,“ about a Beatles cover band, has been included in a short story collection by its author, M.C. Schmidt, the book published by Anxiety Press. One of the best short story writers out there? We think so!
The book is available at Amazon– here— and at other outlets.
WHERE WE’RE GOING
WHY have we been emphasizing at New Pop Lit— at the center of our plan– creating an all-new kind of short story?
This has been the project’s focus from the beginning, based on a recognition that once, briefly, from 1900 into the 1930’s, the short story was the popular American art form, epitomized first by O. Henry’s work, then by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, among others regularly writing pop short stories for Saturday Evening Post (peak weekly readership of six million) and other large-circulation publications. At the depth of the Great Depression, Fitzgerald was earning the equivalent of one million dollars per year, almost completely from his fun and/or romantic short stories. (His peak Post fee of $4,000 per story in 1929, before the stock market crash, would be like being paid $76,000 per story today.)
ANOTHER historical example we focus on is the explosive popularity of rock n’ roll 45 rpm singles– generally two to three minutes in length– from 1955 to 1970. A colorful pop vibe captured in this museum exhibit in Liverpool, UK:
The motivating idea:
EXCITEMENT!
A sense of excitement within the artwork, but also excitement created about the art form.
The short story is the ideal literary form with which to make this happen. But the form first needs to be taken to another level– and the way it’s promoted needs to be taken to another level.
-Karl Wenclas
NEW POETRY
image c/o amazon.com
at
the end
you
can say
you
showed up
every day.
whether
beaten,
fatigued,
hungover,
uninspired,
or rejected –
you
didn’t let
any
of it
get
to you.
you were
unrelenting
when
so many
big
neon signs
flashed
RELENT.
and that
is how
you won.
Ken Kakareka has appeared numerous times at Fast Pop Lit.
His publication, Bullshit, is available at Amazon.
UPCOMING POETRY
I passed Elevator A
A squad of uniformed inspectors
wearing aviator shades in all colors and tints
were struggling, rather comically,
to fit a guillotine (labelled “Exhibit B” – evidence)
The implement of hell was due
for a photo shoot with Court TV at 3 o’clock
I gathered from their angry chatter
about this uncooperative chopping block.
COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!
FRIGHTY #2 IS OUT!
EVENTUALLY the internet will become unusable, buried under ads, pop-ups, paywalls, tests to prove you’re human or maybe that you’re not, and other security and-or moneymaking techniques. When that happens there will need to be escape routes back to sanity and reality– back to the groundedness once provided by Do-It-Yourself print zines.
As usual, Wred Fright is ahead of the curve in such matters, the first escape routes already provided c/o his new Frighty series. #2 has arrived, full of the kind of human writing that will never be offered by robotic machines. In fact, the authentic kind of zine writing offered would cause AI devices and robots of all kinds to blow fuses– “This does not compute!”– because it breaks the refined “rules” of what writing is supposed to look like.
ON TOP of all else, Dr. Fright is offering it to the public FREE. Print it out– here!
“Just download it, print it doublesided (flip on short edge), fold, and maybe bind/staple it, and it is good to go!”
(BONUS: It includes a short rant by myself.)Â
-Karl Wenclas for Fast Pop LitÂ
NEW POETRY!
(photo by RiddiMRyder)
The town’s pizza joint that once held primacy of place
moved long ago and now rules across the road and down aways,
and if you didn’t grow up here, you wouldn’t sense a trace
of the hearty business that used to flourish in this space,
now a blocky cipher that dreams in its latter days
among the dark hemlocks in this bypassed place,
whose needles weave stark shadows, and the walls enlace,
perhaps a proper end in which the elder can laze,
and the long course of its catastrophe, trace
as eighth-century monks might ponder the disgrace
of men in God’s crimson eye as the Norsemen raze
their chapels, bell towers, and every holy place,
why the clanking ovens no longer grace
its innards with a comforting blaze
and the aroma of dough has vanished without a trace,
but perhaps it’s better not to keep apace
of these migrations, no need to craze
the benign, brooding senior in his place,
hiding on a street, both long faded to just a trace.
(photo by MJ Barnes)
John Zedolik an adjunct English professor at Chatham University and Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, and has published poems in many journals– including previously at our main site, here.
NEW SATIRE!
Apparently the inspiration came to the president at the campaign-style rally he held to mark his 100th day in office.
Four days later, he called a press conference and declared that he had received a proclamation from On High. He had missed his true calling and needed to change course. He told the world that he had no choice but to accept this, regardless of the consequences. Then he tore off his suit jacket and red silk tie, unbuttoned his shirt almost to his navel (revealing several gold chains), picked up a florescent yellow electric guitar, planted his feet, strummed an F-chord, and began to bellow.
Some of his most rabid supporters were devastated and could barely contain their grief. They wore black, tore their sleeves, stopped washing their hair, and held “wakes” and “funerals,” including processions and mock obituaries. Some of them spread rumors on social media that the real president had been abducted, was being held captive in a South American prison, and had been replaced by a look-alike from the opposition party. Belief in that theory spread quite widely.
There were those who were secretly thrilled. A rock star, how awesome! They knew all along that he would conquer the world; music was a much more interesting weapon-of-domination than politics.
And some of us were just delighted at his abdication… at least at first, until we realized who would be stepping up into the role.
Cynthia Bernard is a woman in her early 70s, a long-time classroom teacher and an emerging writer of poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Multiplicity Magazine, Heimat Review, BULL, The Seattle Star, Piker Press, Antipodean SF, Medicine and Meaning, and Verse-Virtual. She was selected by Western Rivers Conservancy to serve as the Poet-Protector of Deer Creek Falls in the northern Sierra Nevada foothills.
UPCOMING FICTION
C. Ryan: AfterLife is truly groundbreaking, not just on a technological level, but on a philosophical one too. Individuals can set up profiles at any time in advance of their passing, the earlier the better. By feeding in text logs, emails, and even phone recordings, we can replicate the conversation patterns of the user such that, after death, they can continue to communicate with loved ones—at least as long as there’s a valid card on file. Now, you don’t have to say goodbye.
When she heard about AfterLife, Holly signed up immediately. It was almost a year since Steven died, and her life still felt as unmoored as it had in those first days. But the program promised connection, support, and most importantly, closure. She signed onto the computer that Steven had left—the only one they’d had in the house since she’d never really felt the need for one before—and made an AfterLife account. She checked off approval of the terms and conditions without reviewing the attached 60-page file. The portal prompted her to provide texts, emails, chat logs, phone recordings, voicemails. She didn’t have the password to Steven’s email, and she’d gotten rid of his phone, unable to look at it without thinking of the horrible messages he’d gotten from his classmates. So she provided what little she retained—a couple of essays he’d written for school gathering digital dust in the computer’s file folders, and some texts that she had saved to her phone, and she proceeded with a certain amount of hope that the program could still work the kind of miracle she’d been promised.
She quickly realized it was not to be. Her first message, delivered to her phone an hour after the algorithm had the opportunity to work over the data and establish a persona, left her cold, jaw agape at a text that had to be some kind of cruel joke.
Steven Petersen: sup bitch
COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!
NEW POETRY
(painting by Frederic Remington)
We came to this place,
crowded with stingers and rattles and fangs,
because we too had chaos in us
That miffed chainsaw buzz
booming in our brains
Let me tell you what it was like:
the discontented, the outcast, the felon, the dreamer
discordant with society
living by our own hands, and just barely.
A fist in the jaw hello,
A tenth whisky goodnight.
Gunshots pop down Main like little shouts of joy
Hell, why didn’t everybody go West?
The Tetons stand on the cloud’s shoulders
If you chew a scoop of earth, you’ll chip a tooth on gold.
If this wasn’t Shangri-La,
Surely it was the next hamlet over.
But who needs Big Rock Candy
When we got this sunset?
And when the horizon gulps the glow—
Jesus! Ain’t we got stars!
***
Hal Wright (he/him) is a queer writer whose work has been published in Ninth Letter, The Hunger, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere.
RELEVANT FICTION
“A day late and a dollar short” as the old expression– possibly dating to Fitzgerald’s time– says.
TWO occurrences motivated this post, both involving New Pop Lit‘s Contributing Editor Kathleen M. Crane.
First was her inability to find F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night at any local library. A few libraries, we discovered, don’t carry any of Fitzgerald’s books. Second, Kathleen recently was at a physical therapist’s for a lingering knee injury. In talking to a young employee, Kathleen mentioned that we hoped to soon make an excursion up to northern Michigan’s Hemingway Country, staying at a hotel where he once lived and frequenting his hangouts. The therapist looked perplexed, had never heard of him.
Hemingway and Fitzgerald: the one-time glamor boys of American literature. Literary rock stars. Throughout our time growing up and discovering ourselves as writers in the latter decades of the Twentieth Century, for Kathleen and I, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were the two larger-than-life figures of the art, combining charismatic personalities and compelling biographies with sparkling literary talent and an involvement in the greater world. Models for what American writers should be doing now.
An example of Fitzgerald’s involvement in the world was his 1920 novella, May Day— a multiple-viewpoint depiction of long-forgotten events on May 1, 1919, when anarchist demonstrations and riots, spear-headed by World War I army veterans, took place in cities across America. Fitzgerald ably weaves glimpses of the New York City riots with more personal stories– in his uniquely romantic literary prose style. The result? A multi-dimensional reading experience combining the “literary” with pop sensibility and a topical, here-and-now story. History-come-alive. Innovation, relevance, and style.
WHY can’t we produce this kind of work in 2025?
Karl Wenclas for New Pop Lit
