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Next Thursday night at 7 p.m., come see me read at Get Lost! Bookshop, located at 8 South 9th St. in Columbia, MO. The reading is part of the bookstore’s Cold Reading Series, and I’m sharing the bill with the gracious and talented poet Stephanie Kartalopoulos, as well as Chris Stephens, who is going to play the sitar.

The sitar, people! THE ONLY SITAR IN ALL THE WORLD. How awesome is that?
Apparently there will also be wine and beer.
And it’s free, but you can shop for great books, both used and new.

Lovely place.

I think I’ll be trotting out (ahem) some new work. I’m assuming that if you’re reading this, you already know about me, so here’s Stephanie’s bio to pique your poetic interest:

Stephanie Kartalopoulos (poetry)
Stephanie is a Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at the University of Missouri, where she is also studying towards a PhD in Creative Writing & Literature. She holds an MFA In Creative Writing from the University of Florida and a BA in English from Harvard and has taught at Boston University, Lesley University, the educational non-profit Year Up, Cambridge College, and The University of Florida in addition to Mizzou. Stephanie’s poems appear and are forthcoming from a variety of journals that include 32 Poems, Phoebe, Harpur Palate, Waccamaw, Barn Owl Review, Subtropics, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Fifth Wednesday, and St. Katherine’s Review.

COME COME COME!
-J.

And thus, another story involving horse manure is unleashed on the unsuspecting public!

Read it here…

Linking someone to the Spring 2010 issue of Redivider, I found this review of my story “Shooting A Mule.” Devlin Farmer writes for a site called “The Review Review.” Just like it says on the tin, they review literary reviews. Here’s what Farmer had to say about “Shooting A Mule.”

“Pages 118 and 119 of Redivider illustrate how the magazine runs into problems. On page 119 is an archival photograph from 1881 of a headless mule. (The mule’s head was blown off by explosives strapped to its neck, the detonation of which was photographed.) The preceding pages are J. Bowers’ entertaining re-imagining of the circumstances leading to this actual historic photograph, “Shooting a Mule.” However, setting this disturbing image on the facing page to Cecily Park’s poem “Savage” is so distracting that I actually had to fold the magazine over lest my eyes strayed to the flying blood and mule pieces. (Threaded seemingly randomly throughout the magazine are visual images which, in black and white, are starkly set in the middle of each page. Unfortunately I found them to be a bit too random, in many cases doing a disservice to both artists and writers represented.) Why not set this image opposite the story it belongs to instead of polluting Park’s poem?”

WHY NOT, INDEED.

(And for the record, I’d like to apologize to Cecily Park for inadvertently spraying dead mule detritus all over her poem.)

-J.

My name is Jess, and this is my website. I am a fiction writer, mostly.

Obligatory Moody Author Photo

Right now, I am working on a short story collection about the intersections between horses, photography, and film. The manuscript is tentatively titled “Shooting A Mule (And Other Stories),” but that’s only because “Beating A Dead Horse” and “One Trick Pony” sound a little too on the nose.

If you want to know other things about me, you can visit the “About” page. (How apt!)

This site is regularly updated with links to my work, as well as news about readings, publications, and so forth.

J. Bowers