strannikov

About Me

A mere provincial, I began flash fiction late in 2007: work appeared first @ Delicious Demon (archives closed), then @ Language Is a Virus (archives closed). 2010 and 2011: appeared @ Gone Lawn Journal/Gone Lawn Excavation Project and @ Metazen (archives closed) and as of December 2011 here @ Fictionaut. February 2012: @ Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. March 2015: @ The Miscreant. June 2020: @ Literati Magazine. March 2021: return to Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.

Took to verse unaccountably in Spring 2016. October 2020: @ Chiron Review. November 2020: Pushcart nomination for "Bruegel days, nights by Bosch" courtesy of Amantine B. and Literati Magazine.

Why do you write?

Flannery O'Connor answered as well as any: "Because I'm good at it." Naturally, I don't write as well as Cousin Flannery, but that's her fault, not mine. While she mastered the short story to get the ordeal of writing over as promptly as possible, flash and verse offer even more immediate relief.

Mottos and maxims:

"The text, the text, the text."
"Once a writer, always an editor."
"poetry is steak: / in the center always rare, / even served well-done."
"Applied technology giveth and applied technology taketh away: blessed be the name of applied technology."
--Oh, and: "A 'strannikov' a day keeps anomalocaridids at bay." (This constitutes my enduring promise to my readers: if you read one tale or set of verse by strannikov each day, you need never fear being attacked, assailed, or assaulted by any anomalocaridid.)

Any favorite authors? Books?

Authors: Homer. Juvenal. Lucian. Dante. Villon. Machiavelli. Marlowe. Burton. Vico. Swift. Poe. Gogol. Dostoevsky. Maupassant. Twain. Bierce. Saki. Akutagawa. Čapek. Bulgakov. Kharms. Faulkner. O'Connor. Simenon. Ionesco.

Books: in addition to those represented by the folks above, some recent reads and re-reads: Charles Baudelaire/Paris Spleen (Varèse, tr.); Antoine Compagnon/The Five Paradoxes of Modernity (Philip, tr.); Homer/Iliad (Lattimore, tr.); Marco Santagata/Dante: The Story of His Life (Dixon, tr.); Calvert Watkins/How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics.