old review of washed-up writer by aging sex symbol

Michael James Rizza made the complete text of his thorough review of Fight for Your Long Day available at Goodreads.

#AWP14

I woke up too early, neither exhausted nor rejuvenated, and went downstairs to heat water and prepare corn flakes with milk.

Now it's back to thin herbal tea and Dave Newman's Two Small Birds. The book is trucker fiction, heavy on the fried chicken and poetry.

A facebook comment suggested that Cartilage and Skin author Michael James Rizza picked up some match boxes at the Atticus table at the Book Fair.

On his way to the conference, Dan Cafaro of Atticus walked by a musician busking on the street in Seattle. The guitarist may or may not be Charlie Parr of Austin, Minnesota, but Rizza will understand when I say that it looks like Parr has gotten beyond Duluth.

I'm not at the conference, but the Seattle Public Library system has five print copies of Fight for Your Long Day.

I may soon add swimming or stationary bicycle to my regular walking routines, but for now, I'll count as additional exercise an unease I've experienced, during turbulence, on the smaller planes of my recent flights.

Of course, everything will be fine.

cut 180 pages, part II

AK: You’ve told me you cut out a substantial portion of the novel relatively late in the process. Was it cathartic to make such a large cut? Did it include a “eureka” moment, as in, now I’ve got the right length? Had you queried with the longer manuscript before you sent out this award-winning, revised version? 

MJR: A large part of the preliminary work was a bunch of false starts.  I kept thinking my narrator should be sixteen years old, so I wrote about two and half novels about a sixteen-year-old with the same pathology and hang-ups as my narrator.  There were a lot of the same themes, such as excessive guilt without cause, the connection between male desire and violence, and social awkwardness.  Then, in 1998, sometime around my last week of graduate school in Philadelphia, a classmate. . . pretty much slapped me in the face.  He seemed a bit exasperated by me and acted like it was his last chance to set me straight.  The slap was this comment: “Even Faulkner raped his characters with corncobs.”  That was a pivotal point.  It meant a lot of things, one of which was that I needed to bury my sixteen-year-old and make a new narrator who was, say, forty or fifty.  The problem with the first draft of Cartilage and Skin was that I kept trying to bring the sixteen-year-old back in.  I didn’t let him go.  The cathartic moment was finally cutting out all the flashbacks to his youth, roughly 180 pages.  I only queried the revised version.

Follow this link to read more Michael James Rizza on Cartilage and Skin.

cut 180 pages

Michael James Rizza on Cartilage and Skin:

I started Cartilage and Skin in 1998.  When I went to South Carolina in 2004, I had a complete draft, which was roughly 180 pages longer than the current 324 pages.  As I worked on my PhD, I didn’t really think about my book.  Sometimes during that period, I would open to random pages and tinker with the language.  In 2006, I added a sentence about Horatio Alger; in 2009, I added a sentence about “rhizomatically-inclined sophists.” That was the last sentence I added.  In the spring and summer 2010, after I finished my dissertation, I cut out the 180 pages (which, as I mentioned, dealt with his youth) and moved some things around.

Read more at When Falls the Coliseum.

Cartilage and Skin

Congratulations to Michael James Rizza on this past week's release of his award-winning debut novel, Cartilage and Skin. Over at When Falls the Coliseum, in response to my interview questions, Dr. Mike interweaves thoughts about Martin Luther, Karl Marx, male prostitution, the "masculine imagination," and much more that that.

Be sure to check out the interview, and then buy the book.

michael james rizza

L.U.S.K. continues to be the hot spot for blog titles that include the middle name (no mere middle initial here, party people), so I'm excited to announce that Michael James Rizza has won the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction for his first published novel, Cartilage and Skin. The contest judge was Wesleyan writing professor Deb Olin Unferth.