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suburbanmetaldad · 5 years

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What can I do for you?

Here, friends, is my super power:

I can create an entire book — a good one — quickly, with very little help.

You want a book with your name on it. I can make that happen.

Maybe you typed up a draft, and you’re not sure where to go next.

I can take it from here.

And anything smaller than that will be cheaper and faster.

Get on the schedule while you can.

Following are more details about me and my work.

Follow are links to different things D.X. Ferris makes & does.

I am D.X. Ferris.

I grew up obsessed with music and reading. I went to school for writing. At the time, I thought I couldn’t create things. I didn’t know it yet, but I was wrong. I tried to quit. Writing wouldn’t let me. It kept pulling me back in.

Once I figured out how to do what I wanted to do, I made up for lost time. Now I’ve covered a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction for Rolling Stone. I endured a career-ending injury. I’ve been to the Pentagon on business. I’ve written books with & about some of my iconic heroes. Communication is my business, and business is good.

I do a lot of different things.

I am an award-winning writer, editor, manager, publisher, teacher, speaker, cartoonist, maker, co-author, ghost writer, and overall communications professional. To me, those various & sundry processes are all part of the same sphere — and here’s the common thread: Communication is the art of organizing information. That, friend, is what I do. I can do it for you. And we can make some money together.

I have written/co-written nine books. My personal record is four new books in 16 months.

I cut my teeth as a rock & roll journalist. Then I successfully transitioned to hard news. Lately, I’ve been creating motivational literature and self-help books. I write very effective press releases & promo material. I write & storyboard short videos. I’m writer for a documentary I can’t talk about yet.

I get around. I teach college. My CV includes work for dozens of publications, including Rolling Stone and Alternative Press (America’s two top rock & culture magazines). I’ve also written for leading outlets such as The A.V. Club and Decibel. I write and stage communication seminars.

I have been to the Pentagon and National Air & Space Museum on business. I have been backstage at the Vans Warped Tour on business. My body of work includes book-length oral histories.

I have collaborated with certified Grand Masters, civilians, and high-profile musical & Hollywood creative types. I have had Almost Famous moments on the side of the stage at European festivals. I wake up so early it hurts. I make money for my partners.

I am a 33 1/3 author. An Ohio Society of Professional Journalists Reporter of the Year. And a third-degree black belt (in Taekwondo). Also a 32° two-time WM/PM.

Let’s do some good work — and then let’s do some good with what comes from it.

Click the following links for my...

Good Professional Wrestling: Full Contact Life Lessons From the Pinnacle Performance Art The Good Advice From... series is now officially a franchise. Volume II features a foreword by Diamond Dallas Page, motivational icon, founder of health & wellness movement DDP Yoga, and WWE Hall of Famer. Professional wrestling is the toughest business. It is a form of competition built on collaboration and cooperation. Every successful wrestler has a diverse skill set that can help you get over too, no matter what your business or lifestyle. Filled with short chapters and useful advice, this browsable motivational manual features inspirational quotes from dozens of wrestling icons. Each is followed by easy-to-read analysis and actionable tips that can turn a life around.

I collaborated with Darren Paltrowitz on this one-of-a-kind positivity handbook. It breaks down the habits, skills, and strategies that your favorite superstars practice — and you can too, starting today.

Good Advice From Goodfellas: Positive Life Lessons from the Best Mob Movie It’s the last — or maybe first — motivational manual and self-help guide you’ll ever need. 320 pages, paperback; Kindle ebook also available, cheap. At 145 short chapters, it’s the perfect airport/travel book. This unique meditation & reading finds teachable moments in all your favorite and quotes and scenes from this beloved, seminal movie. If you know what to look for, Goodfellas covers all the same evergreen topics as your favorite business podcasts and startup seminars... but it’s a lot more fun. No, seriously.

Co-author of motivational/how-to Masonic leadership manual

Co-author of parents’ motivational guide to kids’ martial arts

I am the most prominent, prolific non-marquee contributor the music-writing/music journalism textbook How to Write About Music, from the brain trust running Bloomsbury/Continuum’s 33 1/3 series. TECHNICALLY, I AM ON THE SAME LABEL AS NEIL GAIMAN. This is one of two or three books on this topic. Note to self: Write your own.

Wrote the official book with Donnie Iris and the Cruisers For my money, Donnie Iris & the Cruisers are the best-kept secret from 80s rock radio. That had not one, but seven hot 100 hits. The bandleader/songer penned an enduring disco hit. AND he worked with three Rock Hall of Fame artists. The band have a continuous near-40-year run. During this epic tale, they work with a young Trent Reznor, Kiss, Breathless, Cinderella, Sam Kinison, Gamble & Huff, the Jaggerz, Wolfman Jack, and bunch of others. The book is a painstakingly researched oral history that plays like a mix of the four-hour Tom Petty documentary, the movie That Thing You Do!, and the American Hardcore book. Coffee-table book, 464 pages, 102 images, 308 endnotes, 8.5x11″.

Wrote two books about thrash-metal icons Slayer

One is part of 33 1/3, the vanguard series of music-related writing.

One is an exhaustively researched full-length biography featuring 33 images and over 400 endnotes.

Publisher of 6623 Press, home to creator-owned, useful, reasonably priced, unconventional books about popular culture, success, and other cool stuff. People like them.

Full-service, full-contact indie publishing. I write, co-write, ghost-write, edit, and publish books. Quickly.

Do you have book in you? We’ll get it out.

Worked for Rolling Stone, the no. 1 music & culture magazine ever.

I’ve been writing for Alternative Press — America’s no. 2 music magazine — off & on since 2002. More recent pieces are here. Older material is here.

Wrote for alternative newsweekly Cleveland Scene, in various capacities, for 8 years. Won numerous awards for news reporting, business reporting, arts reporting, commentary, feature writing, personality profiling, and sports reporting. Click here for profiles, business features, columns, reviews, and more.

I think this piece about Cleveland’s LeBron James banner won me the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists’ Best Reporter award: Literally the entire city was looking at an iconic, massive piece of public art/advertising — and I was the one person who looked behind the scenes. For alt-weekly Cleveland Scene.

https://www.clevescene.com/64-and-counting/archives/2010/08/05/goodbye-lebron-banner-hello-sunshine-workers-behind-the-banner-speak

For Rolling Stone, I interviewed a band and created unofficial liner notes for a classic album:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/they-might-be-giants-flood-track-by-track-guide-to-the-geek-chic-breakthrough-82345/

This kind of piece is a specialty. For Alternative Press, I interviewed an infamous punk musician about his friendship with the late, great Anthony Bourdain. I supplied many conversation prompts, transcribed it, then edited his answers into one continuous narrative, while I remained invisible in the piece. If it looks like I didn’t do much, then that was the entire point.

https://www.altpress.com/features/anthony-bourdain-harley-flanagan-cro-mags-tribute/

I visit a business, describe the experience, and research how a controversial industry works. For Cleveland Scene.

https://www.clevescene.com/cleveland/game-of-chance/Content?oid=2183398

While the rest of the rock-journalism world were writing SOPA stories (Summarizing Other People’s Articles) about a developing story, I dug deep, excavated some court records, and wrote an informed summary. For Metal Sucks — for my money, the best metal news & views site.

https://www.metalsucks.net/2019/06/11/how-many-more-misfits-reunion-shows-will-there-be-according-to-legal-documents-probably-just-one/

A friendly multi-person Q&A and sidebar, stitched together from three different interviews from different media. For Alt Press.

https://www.altpress.com/features/punk-goes-fearless-records-interview/

Cover story/feature profile of the president of a local university — and how his work has helped shape the city. It’s pretty whitebread and dry, but I can work in that style when I’m not writing about raging hellions. For Cleveland Magazine, the city’s upstanding guide to what’s happening and who’s doing it.

https://clevelandmagazine.com/in-the-cle/the-read/articles/city-mission

News interview with Dan Gilbert, owner of the Cavaliers and Quicken Loans. For Scene.

https://www.clevescene.com/cleveland/enhanced-interrogation-dan-gilbert/Content?oid=1678536

Excerpt from Good Advice From Goodfellas, my self-improvement book that draws positive life lessons from the greatest gangster movie:

https://6623press.tumblr.com/post/181078213342/the-new-self-helpmotivational-manual-good-help

Christmas Sevenfold: Metal Dad, Compendium Two My second comic-strip compilation collects seven years of Christmas & fall holiday stripes, with new art, a foreword, and an essay about why the kind of guy who wrote two books about Slayer still loves Xmas. 180 pages, oversized 8.5 x 11″ paperback.

Suburban Metal Dad, Compendium One: Raging Bullshit. The first compilation book for my webcomic. It collects Years III and IV of the comic, with 172 strips, 8 previously unreleased demo strips, an updated FAQ, and a true-life, all-text real-life metal dad story (so there’s something to really read). 180 pages, oversized 8.5 x 11″ paperback.

Individual strips of Suburban Metal Dad, an online comic that has run twice weekly since 2010.

I am totally into the Misfits/Danzig/Samhain, and wrote a bunch of stuff about this record-setting continuum of ground-breaking musicians

I wrote things for Metal Sucks

Guest on heavy metal podcasts, and bloggage about it all

Guest on assorted TV and superhero-show podcasts

Guest host on rock podcast Lost Together

Annotated both versions of “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” at Genius

Random bloggage about stuff that isn’t necessarily metal... mostly movies and holiday stuff like a survey of Christmas imagery in True Detective season 1

Tweet too much, but it’s healthier than taking cigarette breaks.

The Pentagrammarian: I take note of writing, grammar, usage, and the business thereof. I am one of very few professional writers who can list the four parts of a well-rounded profile or break down the constituent parts of a sentence, in correct technical grammar terms.

The goat had it comin’. I swear.

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bountyofbeads · 4 years

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Book Review: In ‘A Warning,’ Anonymous Author Makes Case Against Re-election https://nyti.ms/36TvAau

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Book Review: In ‘A Warning,’ Anonymous Author Makes Case Against Re-election

The same official who wrote an Opinion essay in 2018 argues in a new book that the president’s contract shouldn’t be renewed.

By Jennifer Szalai | Published Nov. 7, 2019 Updated Nov. 8, 2019, 7:50 AM ET | New York Times | Posted Nov. 8, 2019

“Trust me”: It’s a tired cliché, a throwaway line, but when you first encounter it in “A Warning,” the new book by “Anonymous,” who is identified here only as “a senior Trump administration official,” it lands with a startling thud. Any revealing details have been explicitly and deliberately withheld to protect this person’s identity. Who is this “me” that we’re supposed to trust?

It’s a question that the anonymous author — who wrote an Op-Ed for The Times last year about resisting the president’s “more misguided impulses” — might have anticipated, given how much of the book is devoted to the necessity of “character” and to quoting dead presidents by name.

Not to mention this individual’s own conspicuous failures of judgment thus far. You don’t even have to take it from me; you can take it from Anonymous. “Many reasonable people voted for Trump because they love their country, wanted to shake up the establishment, and felt that the alternative was worse,” Anonymous writes. “I know you because I’ve felt the same way.” A mildly chastened Anonymous now seems to recognize, somewhat belatedly, that President Trump’s peddling of birtherism conspiracy theories and his boasts about grabbing women’s genitals might have constituted their own kind of warning — plausible evidence that Mr. Trump might not magically transform into the dignified statesman Anonymous so desperately wanted him to be.

Anonymous even admits that the thesis of the Op-Ed in The Times — the essay that led directly to the existence of this book, and was published just over a year ago — was “dead wrong” too.

Attempts by the “adults in the room” to impose some discipline on a frenzied (or nonexistent) decision-making process in the White House were “just a wet Band-Aid that wouldn’t hold together a gaping wound,” Anonymous writes. The members of the “Steady State” (the term “Deep State” clearly stings) have done everything they can, to no avail. Anonymous is passing the baton to “voters and their elected representatives” — only now the baton is a flaming stick of dynamite.

“A Warning,” then, is just that: a warning, for those who need it, that electing Mr. Trump to a second term would be courting disaster. “The president has failed to rise to the occasion in fulfilling his duties,” Anonymous intones.The book’s publisher and agents apparently referred to the manuscript as the “December Project,” though the publication date was moved up to this month when the House announced an impeachment inquiry.

“I realize that writing this while the president is still in office is an extraordinary step,” Anonymous says. In light of three years’ worth of resignations, tell-all books, reports about emoluments and sworn testimony about quid pro quos, this is a decidedly minimalist definition of “extraordinary.” How can a book that has been denuded of anything too specific do anything more than pale against a formal whistle-blower complaint?

It’s hard to look like a heroic truth teller by comparison, but Anonymous tries very hard, presenting anonymity as not just convenient but an ultimately selfless act, designed to force everyone to pay more attention to what this book says by deflecting attention away from the person who’s saying it. “Removing my identity from the equation deprives him of an opportunity to create a distraction,” Anonymous writes, referring to Mr. Trump’s compulsion for attacking his critics. “What will he do when there is no person to attack, only an idea?”

Anonymous has seen disturbing things. Anonymous has heard disturbing things. You, the reader, will already recognize most of what Anonymous has seen and heard as revealed in this book if you have been paying any attention to the news. Did you know that the president isn’t much of a reader? That he’s inordinately fond of autocrats? That “he stumbles, slurs, gets confused, is easily irritated, and has trouble synthesizing information”?

“A Warning,” Anonymous says, is intended for a “broad audience,” though to judge by the parade of bland, methodical arguments (Anonymous loves to qualify criticisms with a lawyerly “in fairness”), the ideal reader would seem to be an undecided voter who has lived in a cave for the past three years, and is irresistibly moved by quotations from Teddy Roosevelt and solemn invocations of Cicero.

Plenty of people have preemptively criticized this book as an opportunistic grift, though Anonymous has announced a plan to donate a portion of the royalties to “nonprofit organizations that focus on government accountability,” including the White House Correspondents’ Association. Besides, everything in the text of “A Warning” suggests a dyed-in-the-wool establishment Republican. There’s the typical talk about American exceptionalism and national security. There’s the eternal complaint that President Barack Obama was “out of touch with mainstream America.” There’s a wistful elegy for “our budget-balancing daydreams.” Yes, Anonymous is happy about the conservative judicial appointments, the deregulation, the tax cuts; what rankles is the “unbecoming” behavior, the “unseemly antics.”

A big tell comes early on, when Anonymous reveals what “the last straw” was. It wasn’t Mr. Trump’s response to the right-wing rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, when a white supremacist killed a woman and the president talked about “the violence on many sides.” It wasn’t even the administration’s separation of migrant families at the border. These examples might have left Anonymous appalled, but the truly unforgivable act was when Senator John McCain died last year and Mr. Trump tried to hoist the flag on the White House above half-staff: “President Trump, in unprecedented fashion, was determined to use his office to limit the nation’s recognition of John McCain’s legacy.”

Anonymous says that the president “deserves to be fired,” but that’s just the author indulging in a little rhetorical flourish; what Anonymous really means is that the president’s contract shouldn’t be renewed. Actively seeking to remove Mr. Trump from office, whether by invoking the 25th Amendment or pursuing impeachment proceedings, would be “bad” because “we can scarcely afford further disunion.” Mr. Trump, Anonymous says, should simply not be elected to a second term; only then can the country “undertake the arduous task of moral repair” and “restore the soul of its political system.”

Anonymous declares that this “American spirit” was best exemplified by the bravery shown by the passengers on United Flight 93, who rushed the cockpit on 9/11. We’ve seen Flight 93 used as a conservative analogy before — by another anonymous author no less, writing under the pen name Publius Decius Mus, who argued before the 2016 presidential election that “a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto” and consequently that voting for Mr. Trump offered the only chance for the republic’s survival.

That the same violent tragedy has been deployed to argue one point and then, three years later, to argue its utter opposite is, to put it charitably, bizarre. But then Anonymous, a self-described “student of history,” doesn’t seem to register the discrepancy. Nor does Anonymous square the analogy with an episode mentioned in the opening pages of “A Warning” — of senior officials contemplating a replay of the Nixon administration’s so-called Saturday Night Massacre by resigning en masse. The idea of doing anything so bold was floated within the first two years of the Trump administration, and then abandoned.

Toward the end of the book, an earlier quote from Mr. Trump kept coming back to me, unbidden: “These are just words. A bunch of words. It doesn’t mean anything.”

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Book by ‘Anonymous’ describes Trump as cruel, inept and a danger to the nation

By Philip Rucker | Published November 07 at 8:31 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted November 8, 2019 |

Senior Trump administration officials considered resigning en masse last year in a “midnight self-massacre” to sound a public alarm about President Trump’s conduct, but rejected the idea because they believed it would further destabilize an already teetering government, according to a new book by an unnamed author.

In “A Warning” by Anonymous, obtained by The Washington Post ahead of its release, a writer described only as “a senior official in the Trump administration” paints a chilling portrait of the president as cruel, inept and a danger to the nation he was elected to lead.

The author — who first captured attention in 2018 as the unidentified author of a New York Times opinion column — describes Trump careening from one self-inflicted crisis to the next, “like a twelve-year-old in an air traffic control tower, pushing the buttons of government indiscriminately, indifferent to the planes skidding across the runway and the flights frantically diverting away from the airport.”

The book is an unsparing character study of Trump, from his morality to his intellectual depth, which the author writes is based on his or her observations and experiences. The author claims many other current and former administration officials share his or her views.

The 259-page book — which was published by Twelve, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing/Hachette Book Group, and goes on sale Nov. 19 — does not re-create many specific episodes in vivid detail, which the author writes was intentional to protect his or her identity.

At a moment when a stream of political appointees and career public servants have testified before Congress about Trump’s conduct as part of the House impeachment inquiry, the book’s author defends his or her decision to remain anonymous.

“I have decided to publish this anonymously because this debate is not about me,” the author writes. “It is about us. It is about how we want the presidency to reflect our country, and that is where the discussion should center. Some will call this ‘cowardice.’ My feelings are not hurt by the accusation. Nor am I unprepared to attach my name to criticism of President Trump. I may do so, in due course.”

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham derided the book as a “work of fiction” and its anonymous author as a “coward.”

“The coward who wrote this book didn’t put their name on it because it is nothing but lies,” Grisham wrote in an email. “Real authors reach out to their subjects to get things fact checked — but this person is in hiding, making that very basic part of being a real writer impossible. Reporters who choose to write about this farce should have the journalistic integrity to cover the book as what it is — a work of fiction.”

Earlier this week, the Justice Department warned Hachette and the author’s agents, Matt Latimer and Keith Urbahn of Javelin, that the anonymous official may be violating a nondisclosure agreement. Javelin responded by accusing the administration of seeking to unmask the author.

The author’s Sept. 5, 2018, op-ed in the Times, headlined “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” depicted some senior officials as a bulwark protecting the country from the president’s reckless impulses. Trump denounced it at the time as treasonous.

In the book, the author repudiates the central thesis of the column: “I was wrong about the ‘quiet resistance’ inside the Trump administration. Unelected bureaucrats and cabinet appointees were never going to steer Donald Trump the right direction in the long run, or refine his malignant management style. He is who he is.”

The author describes senior officials waking up in the morning “in a full-blown panic” over the wild pronouncements the president had made on Twitter.

“It’s like showing up at the nursing home at daybreak to find your elderly uncle running pantsless across the courtyard and cursing loudly about the cafeteria food, as worried attendants tried to catch him,” the author writes. “You’re stunned, amused, and embarrassed all at the same time. Only your uncle probably wouldn’t do it every single day, his words aren’t broadcast to the public, and he doesn’t have to lead the US government once he puts his pants on.”

The book depicts Trump as making misogynistic and racist comments behind the scenes.

“I’ve sat and listened in uncomfortable silence as he talks about a woman’s appearance or performance,” the author writes. “He comments on makeup. He makes jokes about weight. He critiques clothing. He questions the toughness of women in and around his orbit. He uses words like ‘sweetie’ and ‘honey’ to address accomplished professionals. This is precisely the way a boss shouldn’t act in the work environment.”

The author alleges that Trump attempted a Hispanic accent during an Oval Office meeting to complain about migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

“We get these women coming in with like seven children,” Trump said, according to the book. “They are saying, ‘Oh, please help! My husband left me!’ They are useless. They don’t do anything for our country. At least if they came in with a husband we could put him in the fields to pick corn or something.”

The author argues that Trump is incapable of leading the United States through a monumental international crisis, describing how he tunes out intelligence and national security briefings and theorizing that foreign adversaries see him as “a simplistic pushover” who is susceptible to flattery and easily manipulated.

After the 2018 killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents, the author writes, Trump vented to advisers and said he would be foolish to stand up to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

“Do you know how stupid it would be to pick this fight?” Trump said, according to the book. “Oil would go up to one hundred fifty dollars a barrel. Jesus. How [expletive] stupid would I be?”

The book contains a handful of startling assertions that are not backed up with evidence, such as a claim that if a majority of the Cabinet were prepared to remove Trump from office under the 25th Amendment, Vice President Pence would have been supportive.

Pence denied this on Thursday, calling the book “appalling” and telling reporters, “I never heard anything in my time as vice president about the 25th Amendment. And why would I?”

One theme laced throughout the book is Trump’s indifference to the boundaries of the law. The author writes that Trump considered presidential pardons as “unlimited ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ cards on a Monopoly board,” referring to news reports that he had offered pardons to aides.

As he ranted about federal courts ruling against some of his policies, including the 2017 travel ban, the author writes, Trump once asked White House lawyers to draft a bill to send to Congress reducing the number of federal judges.

“Can we just get rid of the judges? Let’s get rid of the [expletive] judges,” the president said, according to the book. “There shouldn’t be any at all, really.”

The author portrays Trump as fearful of coups against him and suspicious of note-takers on his staff. According to the book, the president shouted at an aide who was scribbling in a notebook during a meeting, “What the [expletive] are you doing?” He added, “Are you [expletive] taking notes?” The aide apologized and closed the notebook.

The author also ruminates about Trump’s fitness for office, describing him as reckless and without full control of his faculties.

“I am not qualified to diagnose the president’s mental acuity,” the author writes. “All I can tell you is that normal people who spend any time with Donald Trump are uncomfortable by what they witness. He stumbles, slurs, gets confused, is easily irritated, and has trouble synthesizing information, not occasionally but with regularity. Those who would claim otherwise are lying to themselves or to the country.”

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How a Tell-All Memoir Made It Into Print

By Alexandra Alter | Published Nov. 8, 2019 UPDATED 7:36 AM ET | New York Times | Posted November 8, 2019 |

When the news broke last month that a senior Trump administration official had written an anonymous tell-all memoir about serving in the White House, criticism was swift, and unusually bipartisan.

President Trump’s supporters dismissed the book as a likely fabrication. Some administration critics chastised the author for hiding behind anonymity, particularly in the middle of an impeachment inquiry when career government officials are testifying publicly about perceived wrongdoing, often at professional risk.

On Thursday night, the critiques grew louder after The Washington Post obtained an early copy of the book, titled “A Warning,” and reported on its contents. Among the revelations: a discussion among senior officials who considered resigning all at once in a “midnight self-massacre” as a warning to the public of the president’s erratic behavior.

But with the release in recent days of damning transcripts from the impeachment inquiry, the events described in “A Warning” could be seen as overly general and less revelatory than those daily disclosures from Washington.

In a New York Times review, Jennifer Szalai punctured the author’s claim that writing the book was “an extraordinary step” toward informing the public about presidential wrongdoing.

“In light of three years’ worth of resignations, tell-all books, reports about emoluments and sworn testimony about quid pro quos, this is a decidedly minimalist definition of ‘extraordinary.’ How can a book that has been denuded of anything too specific do anything more than pale against a formal whistle-blower complaint?” Ms. Szalai wrote.

The White House was quick to condemn the book, dismissing it as fiction in a statement to The Washington Post.

“The coward who wrote this book didn’t put their name on it because it is nothing but lies,” the White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, wrote in an email to the Post. “Real authors reach out to their subjects to get things fact checked — but this person is in hiding, making that very basic part of being a real writer impossible.”

“A Warning” is the latest and most unusual tell-all political memoir to emerge from President Trump’s administration, following books by former government officials like James B. Comey, Andrew G. McCabe of the F.B.I. and Cliff Sims, a Trump aide.

The anonymous author first caused a stir last year with the publication of an essay in The New York Times stating that many of Mr. Trump’s senior officials “are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations,” adding, “I would know. I am one of them.”

Plans to publish the book came together this year when the literary agents Keith Urbahn and Matt Latimer, co-founders of the Javelin agency, were summoned to meet with a senior member of the Trump administration.

The official claimed to be the anonymous author of a New York Times Op-Ed published last year that describes how administration officials were “working diligently from within” to frustrate many of Mr. Trump’s plans and ambitions.

Because the author’s identity was, and is, closely protected, Mr. Latimer and Mr. Urbahn had chosen not to shop around a book proposal and instead took the project directly to Sean Desmond of Twelve, a division of the Hachette Book Group. The author did not receive an advance for the book and has outlined plans to donate a substantial portion of the royalties to nonprofit groups supporting government accountability and press freedom, according to the publisher.

Mr. Desmond worked on the book in secret over the summer, and its publication was expedited once the impeachment inquiry got underway. The book is scheduled to go on sale Nov. 19, with a first print run of 500,000 copies.

Details, however, began to leak out shortly after its publication was announced in October.

Speculation about the author’s identity, motivation and current job title intensified as publication neared. (The author is listed on the cover as “Anonymous: A Senior Trump Administration Official.”)

This week, the Justice Department sent a letter to the publisher seeking identifying details, and asking for proof that the author had not signed a nondisclosure agreement with the administration and had not gained access to classified information.

“If the author is, in fact, a current or former ‘senior official’ in the Trump administration, publication of the book may violate that official’s legal obligations under one or more nondisclosure agreements,” Joseph H. Hunt, an assistant attorney general, wrote to Carol Ross of the Hachette Book Group.

In a response, Hachette said it intended to honor its commitment to protect the author’s identity.

Still, publishing a lengthy book offers many more possibilities for clues to the author’s name.

“The author is aware that their identity may be revealed as a result of this book,” Mr. Latimer said in an interview with The Times this month. “Every precaution has been taken to mitigate this possibility, but it’s still a real one and we all know that.”

In “A Warning,” the author offers a rationale for remaining anonymous. The writer claims to be protecting not just his or her identity, but to be preserving the impact of the book’s arguments by precluding the possibility of personal attacks by the president or his supporters.

“Removing my identity from the equation deprives him of an opportunity to create a distraction,” the author writes. “What will he do when there is no person to attack, only an idea?”

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limejuicer1862 · 4 years

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Wombwell Rainbow Interviews

I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me. I gave the writers two options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger.

The usual ground is covered about motivation, daily routines and work ethic, but some surprises too. Some of these poets you may know, others may be new to you. I hope you enjoy the experience as much as I do.

Julene Tripp Weaver

is a psychotherapist and writer in Seattle. She has three poetry books: truth be bold—Serenading Life & Death in the Age of AIDS, No Father Can Save Her, and a chapbook, Case Walking: An AIDS Case Manager Wails Her Blues.

She is widely published in journals and anthologies. A few online sites where her work can be found include: Riverbabble, River & South Review, The Seattle Review of Books, HIV Here & Now, Mad Swirl, Anti-Heroin Chic, Writing in a Woman’s Voice and in the Stonewall Legacy Anthology.

Find her online at http://www.julenetrippweaver.com/

or Twitter @trippweavepoet.

The Interview

1. What inspired you to write poetry?

After my father’s death, before I turned twelve, I started to record my dreams and write in a journal. Writing helped during this difficult time, I was bereft. In my fantasy life poets were cool and I longed to be around people who were different. After my mother moved us to the city, I signed up for an evening poetry class at a local college in Queens. I was barely a teenager, and had to depend on my uncle to drive me. He had a bias against poets, the whole way there he yelled about beatniks sitting on floors, saying he worked hard to provide chairs for his family to sit on. I had a poem in my pocket and was terrified. The adult poets talked about poets I didn’t know. I felt like an outsider and realized I needed to understand more. Because of the lack of support, I didn’t go back to that group. Getting back to poetry took a long time, I had to move away from my family and become financially independent.

2. Who introduced you to poetry?

When I was finally living on my own, I started investigating the writing world. Living in Manhattan I found classes at the Y and signed up. I read Peter Elbow’s books on writing. Finding other writers was helpful, I joined a group of women poets for feedback. Then I joined a local chapter of the Feminist Writers’ Guild; we brought in May Sarton to read, and they sponsored me to travel to a conference in Chicago where I gave my first public reading. Judy Grahn’s poetry inspired me, I wanted to write feminist poetry to change the world. Audre Lorde was well known and I learned she taught at Hunter College. I applied to CUNY so I could study with her and got a Bachelor degree with a double major of Creative Writing and Women’s Studies. I’d say Judy Grahn’s book, The Work of a Common Woman, had the most influence, she was such a strong lesbian feminist and I was in that community.

3. How aware were you of the dominating presence of older poets?

When I started my journey as a poet I was unaware of the cannon. Audre started us out with an e.e. cummings poem, but she didn’t teach the older poets. She had us writing and workshopping our poems, reading and going to readings and journaling our impressions. I’ve done much catch-up. A few of the older male poets I admire include William Carlos Williams, William Stafford, Charles Simic, James Tate, Russell Edison, Richard Hugo. A generation in between when poetry was already moving away from rhyme to free verse. And with some of these it is their books about writing poetry that I love. I’ve read Gerard Manley Hopkins, Shakespeare sonnets, and some of the older poets, but I’m not drawn to their work.

4. What is your daily writing routine?

I do not have a routine. Writing means a lot of things; writing new work, editing work, sending out work, composing collections, writing about the work (as in this interview), taking time to do nothing, applying to programs, residencies, grants. There is so much it’s overwhelming. And I easily get overwhelmed. So I’ve learned to be not too hard on myself for what I could be doing at any given moment. I spend far too much time on social media. But I keep a journal that I then cull work from. Plus, I write other genres: memoir and essays, for a few years I wrote articles for a health corner column in a newsletter.

5. What motivates you to write?

It’s a drive to the page, there were periods I did not have that drive and I just existed, lived life, worked and had fun with friends or a partner. Then there are periods where my writing ramps up: I take a class, begin to focus on a particular project, get excited about a call or networking. The newest thing I’ve done with a friend is to start a reading series at a local café once a month. It’s been more stressful than I anticipated. When my last poetry book was published I dedicated over three years to promote it.

6. What is your work ethic?

My first career as a laboratory technician lasted fourteen years; I worked at one lab for over eight years. Then I went back to school and had odd jobs that included my own business cleaning apartments in New York City. After that I did secretarial work, moved to Seattle and went back to school for a Masters in counselling. With that degree I worked for twenty-one years in AIDS services, eighteen of those years for the same agency in different capacities. I work hard and steady. I write hard, too, when I write. Semi-retired now, I have a small private therapy practice and my goal is to devote more time to writing, but I’m also the president of my condo Board. Responsibility and service are a big part of my work ethic, as is doing work from love, which I did working in AIDS services for twenty-one years. When I worked where they had a union I was a rep, and I’ve been part of two union negotiations.

7. How did the writers you read when you were young influence you today?

This is impossible to answer because I’m not sure how the books I loved as a child influenced my writing today. I read Heidi eight times, and all the Nancy Drew mystery novels.

8. Who of today’s writers do you admire the most and why?

There are so many excellent authors! I have to say two I’ve worked with: Louise DeSalvo, I found her when I started Hunter College. She taught a different literature class each semester and I took every class of hers I could. She was a brilliant Virginia Wolf scholar with a PhD in the Deconstruction of Literature. Generous and supportive of her students she bestowed confidence. She constantly had new books coming out in different genres,. Two of her books I keep ready at my fingertips: Writing as a Way of Healing : How Telling Our Stories Transforms our Lives, and The Art of Slow Writing: Reflections on Time, Craft, and Creativity. She also has several memoirs, academic books, fiction and an anthology she edited of Italian American women. She died in October 2018. The other writer is Tom Spanbauer, he trademarked Dangerous Writing. I love his book The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon, so when I heard he was in Portland teaching Dangerous Writing workshops I wanted to study with him. For a year I went back and forth to Portland for several workshops and love his way of teaching. He is open and vulnerable, providing a safe space to write dangerous things that are hard to get onto the page. I’ve read each of his novels, and from him learned even though I am not a fiction writer, what I write has value. There are many other excellent poets and writers I admire.

9. Why do you write, as opposed to doing anything else?

Well I consider myself an artist, and have called myself a health artist. Of all the arts, writing is what I’ve spent the most time to develop. I’ve taken art classes and I practice movement work. I discovered Continuum in 1988 and it has changed my life several times. For ten years, from 1997 to 2007, I ran workshops that combined Continuum movement and writing after taking Emilie Conrad and Rebecca Mark’s Poetry in Motion Intensive. Emilie was the founder of Continuum Movement, she died in 2014. In my workshop we experimented with breath, audible breath and movement that perturbed our interior world, then listened and allowed hand-to-page exploration. From my first Poetry in Motion I started what became a large body of writing about my work in HIV/AIDS.

10. What would you say to someone who asked you “How do you become a writer?”

The best advice is to read a lot of poetry. There is so much good poetry available and you learn by the process of reading a wide range. Also, take classes and find a group where you get together and read your work out loud, then exchange feedback. Or find a group where you use a prompt, write for a timed period then go around and read what was written, either with no feedback or only positive. You’ll begin to get more fluid putting pen to page. It’s best to read it right away without worrying or thinking about it too much. If you have good mentors along the way and the right support I don’t think an MFA is so important.

11. Tell me about the writing projects you have on at the moment.

I’m working on a hybrid memoir and searching for publishers that will answer directly to an author as a first step. As a hybrid form it includes journal excerpts and dreams. I hope to have a my early health essays included in an addendum.

On my to-do list is to develop my next poetry manuscript and start sending it out. But first I need to form an arc from my many poems written in the past several years. Each book birth takes a lot of energy and my last book promotion has been slowly winding down; although I will be on a panel at AWP2020 in San Antonio related to that book reading my poetry.

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews: Julene Tripp Weaver Wombwell Rainbow Interviews I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me.

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