At the recent 2010 Printers Row Lit Fest in Chicago, a reader asked me what my new novel DRAIN is about. I answered, in one breath…
“A near-future where Lake Michigan empties of water and a group of disenfranchised peoples moves in–an end-of-times cult that worships a giant worm–and then, after some years, a planned community corporation, with towns not unlike Disney’s Celebration, Florida, tries to bulldoze the cultists out of the lakebed. DRAIN is about the conflict between the two groups, with alternating chapters that follow 1) a corporate employee called Washington Jefferson Lincoln Qui and 2) the leader of a paramilitary gang raised in the planned communities but set on revolt, called Dial-Up Networking.”
The questioner responded, after a pause: “Sounds great. Is it fiction?”
I invite you to find out for yourself by picking up a copy–or ten–for you and your loved ones.
@Amazon: http://tiny.cc/efvnh
@Northwestern U P: http://tiny.cc/bs1dz
@davisschneiderman.com: http://davisschneiderman.com/drain.html
About Splabman
Poet & interviewer Paul E Nelson founded SPLAB (Seattle Poetics LAB) & the Cascadia Poetry Festival. Since 1993, SPLAB has produced hundreds of poetry events & 600 hours of interview programming with legendary poets & whole systems activists including Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, Robin Blaser, Diane di Prima, Daphne Marlatt, Nate Mackey, George Bowering, Barry McKinnon, José Kozer, Brenda Hillman & many others. Paul’s books include American Prophets (interviews 1994-2012) (2018) American Sentences (2015) A Time Before Slaughter (2009) and Organic in Cascadia: A Sequence of Energies (2013). Co-Editor of Make It True: Poetry From Cascadia (2015), 56 Days of August: Poetry Postcards (2017) and Samthology: A Tribute to Sam Hamill (2019) Make it True meets Medusario (2019), he’s presented poetry/poetics in London, Brussels, Nanaimo, Qinghai & Beijing, China, has had work translated into Spanish, Chinese & Portuguese & writes an American Sentence every day. Awarded a residency at The Lake, from the Morris Graves Foundation in Loleta, CA, he’s published work in Golden Handcuffs Review, Zen Monster, Hambone, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2014 Robin Blaser Award from The Capilano Review, he is engaged in a 20 year bioregional cultural investigation of Cascadia and lives in Rainier Beach, in the Cascadia bioregion’s Cedar River watershed.
