Cup of TNB: Zara Potts

Cup of TNB host Joseph Matheny talks to author and TNB contributor Zara Potts.

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ZARA POTTS is an Associate Non-Fiction editor at The Nervous Breakdown. In a former life, she was a network television journalist, specialising in murder stories and entertainment. She has worked variously as a producer, reporter and publicist as well as contributing to major newspapers and other media outlets in New Zealand. Alongside her television work, Zara has also been involved in radio and film. She also, weirdly, has been a judge for the NZ Music Awards. When she isn’t online, she is working on her first novel. She lives in Auckland with a bionic dog.

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Listen here or at http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/podcasts

Cup of TNB: Erika Rae

Cup of TNB host Joseph Matheny talks to author, TNB contributor, and editor Erika Rae

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ERIKA RAE is the author of IN A HANDBASKET: NOTES FROM A RECOVERING EVANGELICAL (forthcoming from Emergency Press, 2011). She is also a nonfiction editor at TheNervousBreakdown.com. When she is not whipping one of her 43 children and denying them bread with their broth, she runs a WISP with her husband from their home in the mountains just outside Boulder, CO. She has a Masters in Literature and Linguistics from the University of Hong Kong and is still not quite sure why she did that. She loves kung fu, archery, drinking red wine and believes that the words ‘chocolate’ and ‘Hershey’s’ have nothing to do with one another. She can also compliment your hair in Cantonese. You can friend Erika on Facebook or Twitter @ErikaRae. http://www.erikaraebooks.com

For more information about The Nervous Breakdown check out TNB in the LA Times or ABC.

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Cup of TNB: Steve Abee

Cup of TNB host Joseph Matheny talks to TNB contributor, poet and author Steve Abee .

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STEVE ABEE was born in Santa Monica, California and began writing after high school when he held a job as an orderly at St. John’s Hospital. His mind started to unfold itself and he thought if he was going to save it, he had better start writing things down. Abee recalls, “I saw the fragility and blessedness of lives and started to come apart in the wonderment of it all.”

Abee writes in the American lyric tradition of Whitman and Kerouac yet as numerous fans remark, experiencing Abee perform his work in person is like attending a university lecture if Iggy Pop was the professor! Suffice it to say, Abee is his own kind of American Literary experience. His work seeks the ecstatic universal in the common grains of the day. Beck Hansen has called Abee “the love-powered bull horn blasting down from the altitudes,” and Lydia Lunch has remarked that his “savage poetry demands the reader to devour passage after passage, only to be left soul seared and simultaneously re-invigorated.”

He holds a MFA in Fiction and Poetry from Antioch University, Los Angeles and just released a new poetry collection, Great Balls of Flowers on Write Bloody books. Also his novel, Johnny Future, is coming out with MacAdam/Cage in the Fall of 2010; Other titles include The Bus: Cosmic Ejaculations of the Daily Mind in Transit (Phony Lid Books), and King Planet (Incommunicado), a collection of short stories and poems.

He lives and teaches in Los Angeles.

http://steveabee.com/

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Cup of TNB: Heather Fowler

Cup of TNB host Joseph Matheny talks to TNB contributor, poet and author Heather Fowler . They discuss the infamous iPhone application censorship that involved one of Heather’s Flash Fiction stories. More about that story here and on the podcast.

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HEATHER FOWLER received her M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University in 1997. She has taught Literature, Writing, or Composition related courses at UCSD, Modesto Junior College, and California State University Stanislaus. She is the Poetry Editor at Corium Magazine.  Her poetry has recently appeared in The San Diego Poetry Annual 2009 (2010); poeticdiversity (December 2009); The Medulla Review (Fall 2009); INTHEFRAY (February 2007), Empowerment4Women.com (November 2007), and been selected for a joint first place in the 2007 Faringdon Online Poetry Competition (October 2007), as well as published in various venues including: the Map of Austin Poetry, The Coast Highway Review, the Driftwood Highway 1999 Anthology, Joe’s Journal, Best of the Beach 1998, The Publication, and the Cityworks Literary Anthology, Volume 6.  She runs an open participation annual Poem A Day in July marathon at her MySpace creative blog.

For more information about The Nervous Breakdown check out TNB in the LA Times or ABC.

Listen here or at http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/podcasts

Cup of TNB: Slade Ham

Cup of TNB host Joseph Matheny talks to TNB contributor, author and stand-up comedian, Slade Ham.

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Slade Ham is a stand up comedian. He has performed in 22 countries on four continents. When not on stage, he drinks Irish whiskey on the rocks and listens to rock and roll much too loud. One day he hopes to write a book, host a travel show, and continue to trick the world into paying him to do the things he loves to do. He keeps a very expensive storage unit in Houston, TX.

For more information about The Nervous Breakdown check out TNB in the LA Times or ABC.

Listen here or at http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/podcasts

Cup of TNB: Chris Illuminati

Cup of TNB host Joseph Matheny talks to TNB contributor and author Chris Illuminati. (Yes, that’s his REAL name)

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Writer CHRIS ILLUMINATI has lived in Lawrenceville, in central New Jersey (also Jon Stewart’s hometown), his entire life. He is a regular contributor to such popular men’s sites and publications as AskMen.com, Asylum.com, TheBachelorGuy.com, BlogsWithBalls.com, and Penthouse, although he’s also written for Cosmopolitan (go figure). His many humorous perspectives can be found at his own blog (www.chrisilluminati.com), and he scopes out trends, dishes advice, and blogs about a number of subjects on a daily basis for phillyBurbs.com, the web site for three suburban Philadelphia newspapers owned by Calkins Media. Illuminati is co-author of the humorous new assertiveness guide for men, A**holeology: The Science Behind Getting What You Want – And Getting Away With It (Adams Media), which was recently featured on TMZ, in OK! Magazine, and a bunch of other celebrity sites just because some hunk from the Twilight saga was photographed reading it while sitting in a tree. Illuminati is a 2000 graduate of Rider University. He and his wife are expecting their first child, a son, in March 2010.

For more information about The Nervous Breakdown check out TNB in the LA Times or ABC.

Listen here or at http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/podcasts

Cup of TNB: GINA FRANGELLO

Cup of TNB host Joseph Matheny talks to TNB fiction editor and author Gina Frangello.
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GINA FRANGELLO is the fiction editor of The Nervous Breakdown. She is the author of the novel My Sister’s Continent (Chiasmus 2006) and the collection Slut Lullabies (forthcoming from Emergency Press). She was the longtime Editor of the literary magazine Other Voices, and co-founded its book imprint, Other Voices Books, where she is now the Executive Editor of the Chicago office. Her short stories have been published in many lit mags and anthologies, including A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connection, Prairie Schooner, StoryQuarterly, Swink and Clackamas Literary Review. She guest edited the anthology Falling Backwards: Stories of Fathers and Daughters (Hourglass) and teaches creative writing at Columbia College Chicago and Northwestern University’s School of Continuing Studies. Gina lives in Chicago and can be found online at Facebook, www.ginafrangello.com and the Other Voices Books’ website, www.ovbooks.org. She has twin daughters, a wild preschooler son, and never sleeps.

For more information about The Nervous Breakdown check out TNB in the LA Times or ABC.

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Cup of TNB: Robin Antalek

Cup of TNB host Joseph Matheny talks to TNB contributor and author ROBIN ANTALEK
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ROBIN ANTALEK has been published in numerous literary journals and has twice been a finalist in Glimmer Train’s Family Matters and Short Story Award for New Writer’s Contests as well as a finalist in the Bellingham Review’s Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction and the winner of The Hudson Valley Writer’s Guild Award for New Fiction. Her first novel, The Summer We Fell Apart, will be published by Harper Perennial in January of 2010. She lives in Saratoga Springs, NY with her husband and children. You can visit her site @ www.robinantalek.com

For more information about The Nervous Breakdown check out TNB in the LA Times.

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Cup of TNB: Noria Jablonski

Cup of TNB host Joseph Matheny talks to author and TNB contributor Noria Jablonski.

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NORIA JABLONSKI is the author of the story collection Human Oddities (Counterpoint, 2005). Her stories have appeared in FiveChapters.com, Swink, Monkeybicycle, KGB Bar Lit, and the anthology Who Can Save Us Now?: Brand-New Superheroes and Their Amazing (Short) Stories.

For more information about The Nervous Breakdown check out TNB in the LA Times.

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Cup of TNB: Episode 6: Peter Gajdics

Cup of TNB host Joseph Matheny talks to TNB contributor and author Peter Gajdics about his experiences that influenced his book Crossing Styx.
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Peter Gajdics is the winner of Opium magazine’s 2009 500-word memoir contest, and has also been published in New York Tyrant, The Gay and Lesbian Review/Worldwide, Gay Times, and The Printed Blog. His first book, CROSSING STYX, is about his six years in primal therapy trying to “change” his sexual orientation from gay to straight, and the subsequent medical malpractice suit he filed against his former psychiatrist for treating his homosexuality as a disease. Peter lives in Vancouver, Canada, and can be contacted at gajdics@hotmail.com.

For more information about The Nervous Breakdown check out TNB in the LA Times.

Listen here or at http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/podcasts