via Jonathan Larroquette

Which reminded me I’ll probably need this DVD on my shelf, too.

Back in March, I was all set to interview GZA from The Wu-Tang Clan. He was playing at Zydeco, and my friend Joshua Shoemaker was taking some photographs of him. Unfortunately, some scheduling conflicts kept the interview from ever happening, though Joshua did nab some sweet images of GZA immediately before he went onstage. (Above image comes courtesy of Joshua.)

My buddy Chris Staples of lesser-known Twothirtyeight and Discover America superstardom also happened to be playing in Birmingham that night. He was on tour with Andy Shauf, another awesome singer-songwriter, and as the night progressed they both ended up crashing in my less-than-comfortable living room. Since I already had a list of questions printed out for GZA, at some point Chris suggested we do the interview with him instead. We didn’t deviate from the questions, and the results were pretty hilarious.

You can read the whole interview at Chris’s blog.

The first is a short story I wrote last year, called NOLAN, which is available  in the 2.1 issue of White Whale Review.

The second is this book review. While I was at the Alabama Book Festival in Montgomery a couple weeks back, I met an incredibly kind fella named Wade Hall. He’s written nearly twenty books, which are mainly biographies of interesting people. He was there promoting his newest title, An Interview With Abraham Lincoln: April 1, 1865. Hall signed a copy for me, which I quickly read and wrote about for the Alabama Writers’ Forum.

Been pounding away at a first draft for a new novel. The first person to send along any writing work will be met with showers of confetti and mouth kisses.