“A Sort of Miracle” (excerpt from novel, Antenna): Louisiana Literature Journal (34.1)
“Antenna” (excerpt from novel, Antenna): Route 7 Review (Issue 5)
“Pastoral” (essay from collection, Down and Out in Some Place You’ve Never Heard Of): Shark Reef (Issue 30)
“Traces of a Piano Player” (essay from collection, Down and Out in Some Place You’ve Never Heard Of): Arkansan Review (Fall 2020)
“Ward’s Landing” (essay from collection, Down and Out in Some Place You’ve Never Heard Of): Blood & Bourbon (Issue 7: Begin Again)
“Shepard’s Haunt” (essay from collection, Down and Out in Some Place You’ve Never Heard Of): Adelaide Literary Magazine (Number 43) online; print
“Joyland” (essay from collection, Down and Out in Some Place You’ve Never Heard Of): White Wall Review (Issue 50)
“Hazelgreen” (essay from collection, Down and Out in Some Place You’ve Never Heard Of): Knot Magazine (Spring 2023)
“A Summer, A Fall” (excerpt from memoir, That Hour): Level: Deep South
“An Interview with Lee Martin”: Jelly Bucket (Number 7)
“Chuck Klosterman Talks About Writing: An Interview“: Fiction Southeast
BOOKS
The author is seeking representation for the following:
Antenna: A Novel
What do you have to do to get what you want? What happens when you get what you want? That’s what Frank Russet finds out as he and his brother, Henry, make a name for themselves as revival faith healers in the rural south. Frank’s fear of falling behind the thin line separating success and abject failure drives him to great heights and dark valleys, as he wrestles with his contradictory nature.
Like Flannery O’Connor’s Wiseblood, Antenna complicates faith, authenticity, hypocrisy, and redemption. The novel melds the tone of Leonard Gardner’s Fat City and the subject matter of The Apostle film with the antihero POV of True Detective. Antenna was a semifinalist for the University of New Orleans Press’ Book Prize. Excerpts from the novel have appeared in Louisiana Literature Journal and Route 7 Review.
Down and Out In Some Place You’ve Never Heard Of: Essays
What do Sam Shepard, a Shaker woman, a jazz pianist from eastern Kentucky, a desecrated corpse, Merle Haggard’s illegitimate son, the 1918 influenza epidemic’s impact on one eastern Kentucky family, and lost catacombs have in common? Where is Melanie Flynn’s body? What traces remain of those that came before us? This creative nonfiction essay collection explores all this and more. Down and Out in Some Place You’ve Never Heard Of chronicles unsung people and places in Kentucky and investigates the nature of impermanence.
The book combines Hunter S. Thompson’s style of centering the narrator’s experience with the emphasis on place–both personal and mythical–of Hemingway’s Nick Adams’ stories, Joyce’s Dubliners, and the TV show Twin Peaks. Essays from the collection have appeared/are forthcoming in Blood & Bourbon, Arkansan Review, Shark Reef, Knot Magazine, Adelaide Literary Magazine, and White Wall Review.
Wes Blake 