Tag: creative-writing

Friday Five: ‘Rainbow Road’ author/road warrior Scott Laudati

‘As soon as I decided to just be exactly me, and stop playing other people’s games, this whole sea parted.’

I rarely get the chance to meet, in person, a writer I know only through social media. Beyond the occasional local poetry reading, I don’t get to many literary events.

So when I found out that one of those writers I’ve known only through Twitter/X, Scott Laudati, would be doing a poetry reading at the Osage Arts Community in nearby Belle, Missouri, I made plans to be there. Scott was on the road, as he often is, and in the middle of a multi-state tour to read from his latest poetry collection, Rainbow Road, which I’d read over the summer, along with his 2022 semi-autobiographical novel Play the Devil.

Me exchanging books with Scott Laudati in Belle, Missouri, prior to Scott’s reading at Osage Arts Community, August 2026.

Scott’s a child of the working class, New Jersey born, and those roots come through in his writing, especially in Play the Devil, a tale of a mid-twenties college dropout who returns to his hometown, works a summer as a pool boy, and attempts to discover a lost love while discovering himself along the way. Although it takes place in one section of the country, it’s as much a journey as the road trip saga that is Rainbow Road.

That Scott would include Belle, population 1,381, on his itinerary of travels–which took him from Brooklyn to Connecticut, West Virginia, Ohio, Illinois, Detroit, Philadelphia, and elsewhere–should not surprise anyone who knows much about him or follows him on social media. He’s a true literary road warrior who has more wanderlust than a dozen Jack Kerouacs. He seems to be born for the road, and he revels in discovering out-of-the-way places and what they say about the overall American experience.

Scott documents his travels not only through poetry, but also via the medium of video. On his YouTube channel, you can find great videos of several ghost towns he visited earlier this year along old Route 66, the Mother Road, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2026.

When he isn’t tramping around the country, experiencing and celebrating the country like a 21st century Walt Whitman, he also fronts a band known as Camp Winapooka, which released an EP, Capture the Flag!, earlier this year. Scott sometimes performs solo at his poetry readings. Here’s the band’s official Rainbow Road music video.

Oh, and did I mention that Scott is also an artist? This fall, he will be back in Belle to exhibit some of his paintings. So if you’re in the area, stop by!

In today’s Friday Five, Scott talks about his many creative interests, early influences, life on the road, and treading water while on mushrooms.

So buckle in. We’re going for a helluva ride.

1. You are a man of many artistic interests: a poet, a novelist, an artist, a musician, a filmmaker, a pizza connoisseur, and probably many other things I’ve failed to mention here. How do you describe yourself, artistically speaking?

I was a boy that felt like I had something to prove. My dad was my enemy growing up and I can’t say I had any real friends. So I always thought there was something wrong with me–I was ugly, or dumb, or just generally repulsive to everyone else who seemed to have it very easy. Art was the thing I realized I could hide behind. I didn’t have to be appealing on the outside or try and be a different person, I could let the work speak for itself. So I became a psycho about it, diving into every medium with a ton of discipline because every day that I got better was a day further from this exterior I was born with, and I trusted that if I kept working at it eventually I’d be a person of value. I guess I’d describe myself as a bro with a great head of hair.

2. How did you first become interested in writing, and why have you pursued poetry so intensely?

I was grounded every day growing up so I read a ton of books. The first book I remember something sparking was Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. I felt just as lonely and scared as the main character but I also knew I was brave like him, too. That’s when I realized I could channel what I was feeling into characters that didn’t have to be me, but I could write pieces of myself into them.

Poetry wasn’t something I took very seriously at first and I really had no
foundation at all. I didn’t know living people were still writing poetry until I started sending mine out to get published. I always saw myself as a novelist but now I really think the power is in poetry. I love coming up with these kinds of mini campfire stories to tell about the life I’ve lived and my friends have lived and all these highways we’ve driven through night after night, between cities and states most people will never see. And it’s so much easier to get people to read a poem than a novel.

3. Your latest collection of poetry, Rainbow Road, is phenomenal. What inspired you to create this book?

Mushrooms. I was opening pools this spring and I was unbearably depressed because somehow no matter how many unions I join or girls I fall in love with I end up back in New Jersey every 3 years cleaning pools. It’s like a nightmare you think you’ve woken up from and then something insane happens and you realize you’re stuck in sleep paralysis and the only way out is death. And I was so sick of playing games with publishers, and which publisher was really hot right now and whichever one had been last year was totally irrelevant now. And none of them do anything for you anyway except posting about your book twice on their instagrams. So I was really ready to throw in the towel.

One of the owners of a pool we opened gave us a whole bunch of mushroom chocolate bars as a tip. I went home and thought, “Well, I hate my life anyway, I might as well eat all these mushrooms.” And can I tell you, I had the most beautiful 12 hours, treading water in my parents’ pool, rolling around in the lawn with the dogs, and I realized that no one could write like me and I couldn’t write like anyone else, and I had a story to tell about dragging my flag from one end of this country to the other that no one else could tell, so before I quit I knew I needed to get this last batch of poems out, and I decided to give this thing one more go, and it’s been incredible. The response has been great. I’ve met so many amazing people. As soon as I decided to just be exactly me, and stop playing other people’s games, this whole sea parted. It’s a lesson I learned early, and I almost forgot, and it basically killed me creatively. But it saved me too. I’ll fight to the death for my art; I feel like I have. No one else is going to do that for you.

4. Music is an obvious influence on your creative life, as evidenced by the title of Rainbow Road (Kris Kristofferson) and your publishing house, Bone Machine (a Tom Waits reference). Who are some of your other influences, either from the world of music or writing or filmmaking, or other fields? Please narrow to three or four, with a brief explanation of why they influence you.

This is going to sound so stupid but Green Day is the most important thing that ever happened to my life. I went to Catholic school and never really heard any music until my neighbor, Philip, a Jewish kid who went to public school invited me over in third grade. I went to his house and he played me Kerplunk by Green Day and it was like a nuclear bomb going off in my soul. It was really like a person who’d lived in a cave their whole life suddenly being handed a slice of the best pizza. It changed the whole game. After that everything was boring. I’d been handed the Rosetta Stone of a different Universe. And it set the rest of my life in motion.

That’s the only important influence. Everyone else steered me lyrically, or expanded on my consciousness, but Green Day was the revolution. My whole life, for good or bad, was just a result of that day in Philip’s bedroom.

5. What is the most challenging aspect of the road warrior artist’s lifestyle?

Going home. The road is the only way to live in “the now.” All you have to do is soak in a new city, sell yourself to the audience, and then hang out with a bunch of cool people after the show. You haven’t eaten, you haven’t slept, you’ve been hungover every day for a month. It’s the best. Going home is hard. Once you’ve gone feral it’s impossible to become a citizen again. You’re just looking for the next way out.

BONUS QUESTION: Your final poem in Rainbow Road, “Outer Sunset,” is a heartbreakingly beautiful piece that end with the lines “The last poem I’ll ever write/never to begin again.” Should we readers take this statement literally? Is this truly the end of the road for Scott Laudati the poet? If so (or if not), what comes next? (Okay, that’s three questions. Sorry.)

I think I’ve said everything I have to say. I think I said it all in my first book and I’ve just been rewriting the same poem for almost two decades. Men used to go out to sea when they felt like this. I found a church in Rich Fountain, Missouri, that called me up the mountain to its altar. I’m not sure what it means but I think I will soon.

***

New essay: ‘Secondhand Guitar’

A 500-word micro-essay published in Pittsburgh Review of Books

Some artifacts of our lives become lost to time but live on in our memories. Such is the case of some hand-me-down guitars I once owned. These were the beginner’s instruments that blistered my tender fingers and spurred me to continue to practice as I dreamed of rock’n’roll glory, until I became a guitar player of some competency, if not proficiency.

My essay, “Secondhand Guitar,” is a 500-word piece about some of the guitars that shaped my growth as a musician. It was published earlier this week in the Pittsburgh Review of Books as part of its Object Lessons Impressions series of mini-essays–or “essayettes,” as PRoB calls them–“on the hidden lives of ordinary things.”

I wrote “Secondhand Guitar” thanks to the encouragement of Dr. Margret Grebowicz, the Weiner Distinguished Professor of Humanities at my former employer, Missouri University of Science and Technology. Margret also created and leads the Public Scholars Network at Missouri S&T, and last spring invited me to join the group. The network includes academics, mainly, who want to get their work out into the world beyond academia. I’m all about that, so I readily agreed to join the network, and I’m happy to add “Secondhand Guitar” to my growing list of music-themed writings. I hope you’ll give it a read and let me know your thoughts.

Cover image via Pexels.

Friday Five: short story writer Charlie Kondek

‘… in advertising I was a strategist, and I think I bring a strategist’s approach to writing.’

There’s a certain type of fiction writer who comes to the craft from the world of public relations and marketing, and brings that perspective and expertise to their work. A knack for straightforward storytelling mixed with a bit of salesmanship. Charlie Kondek is one of those people.

Charlie Kondek in his man cave, enjoying a libation and the liner notes of Gordon Lightfoot’s Sundown album.
Continue reading “Friday Five: short story writer Charlie Kondek”

Friday Five: more rage against the AI machine

Or, long live the em dash and rule of three!

The news regarding artificial intelligence’s intrusion into the world of writing, editing, and publishing is not, dear reader, heartening. Since my May 20 post about AI’s intrusion into the world of writers and writing (“Crossing the AI Rubicon,” about allegations a short story created by a large learning model, or LLM, won a prestigious literary prize), much more has transpired, and it all confirms that we are now in new territory. The AI ick is unavoidable. It’s seeping under our doors and through the cracks of our windowsills like some alien life form in a 1960s horror movie. Or like sewage spewing from a backed up septic system. It ain’t pretty. And it shows no sign of abatement.

Among many recent AI-related stories that make me cringe, if not rage:

1. The AI-pocalypse is here

So proclaims Becky L. Tuch in her recent Lit Mag News piece, “Q: The AI-Pocalypse is here. How do we even deal?“

“Sad truth: AI-generated writing is everywhere now,” she begins. “It’s in articles on prominent news sites, it’s in YouTube videos, it’s in the comments sections on articles and it’s in many articles here on Substack …”

AI is so prevalent, even Becky, ever vigilant at sniffing out AI-generated or -influenced writing, she fesses up to linking to “at least two articles” in a recent newsletter that she “suspected were at least partly generated with AI. Yet I linked to the pieces anyway. I know, I know. Yet in spite of my many misgivings, the content was relevant. And, for the love of all that is holy, such articles are frankly harder and harder to avoid.”

Becky loathes “the sound of AI-generated text”–as do I and most writers I know. She continues to share why:

It is not just bad writing. The bad-writing missteps that humans make include too much backstory, long digressions into a character’s feelings, telling a feeling rather than showing it. In nonfiction, human missteps include too much throat-clearing, articles which never get to any particular point or which limp flaccidly under the weight of contradictions and undeveloped ideas.

AI-generated text, by contrast, is highly proficient. It builds to riveting climaxes. It spins vapid and meaningless events into epic sagas.

Perhaps this proficiency is why so many are leaning into using AI for writing.

As for the question of her headline–“How do we even deal?”–she offers a quiz, not unlike those that used to populate glossy “women’s” magazines of old like Cosmopolitan or the more common, checkout-line publications like Women’s World. Give the entire post a read.

    2. Apparently, some horror writers ain’t skeered of AI

    That’s the conclusion I draw from a recent blog post from writer Keith Roysdon.

    The horror, the horror: Horror Writers Association column says AI is good and inevitable in an incredible self-own

    Keith outlines the issues related to this column’s pro-AI stance and, in an important aside, spells out why promoting AI is, essentially, evil.

    AI kills careers and it kills people. It takes work and money away from writers and editors and artists and musicians AND DOES ALL OF THEIR WORK IN A WORSE MANNER and the data centers that power AI are killing the planet, using up mammoth amounts of water to cool their technology, befouling the environment with hundreds of diesel engines that power data centers, committing sound pollution in poor neighborhoods – and they’re often in poor neighborhoods, isn’t that a surprise? – and generally making life worse for everyone except the people who own the AI companies and data centers.

    I hope you’ll take the time to give Keith’s post a read.

    3. ‘It takes a profession that I love and turns it into a soul-crushing curse.’

    Dealing with the specter of AI as a writer is horrible enough. We can continue to write to our heart’s content without ever consulting ChatGPT or any other LLM, and can be at peace knowing that, despite our use of em dashes or any other so-called “tells” of AI usage, our writing is 100 percent human. But teachers–particularly teachers of English or other writing-intensive disciplines–must deal with AI’s pervasiveness in the student body they are charged with teaching.

    “Where I once in-formed young minds, I now work to undo the de-formed,” writes Barbara Castle, who teaches English at Arkansas State University, in her marvelous essay “I Prefer Not To: Literary Laments in the Age of AI Dead Letters.”

    The falsely self-assured plagiarist who claims the inhuman derived prose is their own “instead of the cross, the Albatross / about [their] neck is hung.” A weight they are beginning to consider, as Jeff Sharlet points out in this article in The Chronicles of Higher Education. The visible burden of an inflated GPA they did not earn is causing “corroded mental health,” cynicism, and “some are filled with guilt.” I too, pay a similar price in a current system where credentials risk losing their meaning. Simulated competence “yaws and founders” toward shipwreck. Employers cry fraud. Students cry fraud. Instructors cry fraud. And universities cry “fraud” too, though the confusion may be one they helped create.

    She adds: “Passing grades for those who did not do the work is a moral injury to both student and teacher. Ethical dissonance over time wears the psyche down. The injustice of the C student, who does their own work, and the A student that does not, will the piper pay. The spuriously gained fake scholarship will cost us all—one day. Dostoevsky understood this. The crime may remain invisible. The punishment will not.”

    The Faustian bargain of using AI to cheat for a good grade will unfortunately stick with us. And maybe it will creep into other, non-academic aspects of our reading and writing lives (see item 4, below).

    4. Maybe students could use AI to help understand books, like this journalist at Axios

    By now we’ve heard about students no longer being required to read whole books for classes. Reading books is just so dang hard and time consuming! Maybe the answer is to have an AI tool to help readers make sense of those big ol’ novels, especially in this era of diminished attention spans. That’s what Nicholas Johnston, the publisher of a punchy, to-the-point newsletter called Axios, is doing. In his article “Robot book club,” he writes:

    AI has become my reading buddy as I’ve plowed through my summer book list, helping me keep track of plots and characters, unpack themes, and make sense of wordy, old prose.

    “The way many of us actually read books — a few pages before bed, a chapter at the beach, another on a plane — makes it easy to lose the thread,” he writes. “AI can help you pick it back up without starting over.”

    To help him plow through James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, which was “far too dense for casual vacation reading,” he prompted his AI assistant to be his “guide” to “help me understand what I’ve read and where the story is, without giving spoilers or getting ahead of my progress.” The robot acknowledged the difficulty with Cooper’s prose–his “sentences are long and his diction is archaic”–and promised to give Johnston “a recap of what’s happened so far and clarify anything confusing. … I’ll stick strictly to what you’ve read. No hints about what’s coming.”

    Well, at least he’s trying to read. That counts for something, doesn’t it?

    Some on literary Twitter don’t much care for Johnston’s approach (which, by the way, is consistent with Axios‘ strong pro-AI stance in journalism and communications).

    As someone who was required to read eleven novels for one college course–who knew that a course called The American Novel would require so much reading?!–I wonder if I would have taken advantage of an AI assistant the way Johnston is, and would have contributed to my own cognitive decline, the way Katherine Argent (aka @effthealgorithm) suggests Johnston is doing? Maybe if he picked something a bit lighter for his vacation read, he wouldn’t feel the need to rely on AI.

    5. Speaking of ‘eff the algorithm’… eff the AI!

    The last words of this Friday Five go to Ann Handley, an insightful and entertaining writer who’s focused mainly on the business of marketing writing. The following comes from the latest version of her fortnightly newsletter, Total Annarchy, which anyone who writes anything should subscribe to, in my opinion. Her latest newsletter is titled “AI slop, accusations, and a better way,” and it’s just such a damn good article that I’m quoting from it extensively.

    AI learned all it knows from hoovering up what we all have written for generations, in books both good and bad, in both beautiful prose and the clunky text riddled with cliches and crutches. AI sucked it all up without discernment, because AI cannot discern. It mashed The Odyssey with How to Talk to Your Cat About Gun Safety with a Reddit post about fixing your dishwasher and then let it gurgle in its gut a bit before it burped it back out as “models” we can use to “write.”

    Except it’s not “writing.” It’s just data. That’s not pejorative. It just is.

    And by the way, “hoovering” is actually a nice way of describing what actually happened. The process itself was at times violent. Anthropic spent millions of dollars buying physical books in bulk, then used industrial hydraulic cutting machines to slice off the bindings and spines, fed the loose pages into high-speed scanners, converted the images into machine-readable text files, and then threw the paper remains straight into the garbage. Some of those books stripped for parts were reportedly rare.

    If that’s not a metaphor for what’s actually going on with writing today, I don’t know what is.

    Not all hope is lost, however. Since AI is learning from human slop, we can–and should–do the hard work of writing well.

    “Most of us should spend less energy trying to detect AI or not,” she writes. “Develop the judgment to know what not to hand over to the robots.”

    Choose when not to take the shortcut. Protect the parts of yourself that deserve more of you. The parts where the struggle helps you…

    • Think more clearly
    • Develop taste
    • Make something distinctive
    • Feel deep joy, or
    • Grow

    That’s the resistance. It’s the only way through.

    That… and for pete’s sake use em dashes. They are blameless.

    Good points. And don’t surrender the rule of three, either.

    Image via Pexels.

    Friday Five (minus one): on creating well-rounded characters

    Expounding on advice from Sue Monk Kidd’s craft book/memoir ‘Writing Creativity and Soul’

    Welcome to 80 percent of a Friday Five. Today’s featured listicle contains only four points, but they are loaded with great information for writers who want to up their game.

    Today’s post attempts to expound on some pointers about character development from Sue Monk Kidd‘s 2025 craft book/memoir Writing Creativity and Soul.

    Image of Sue Monk Kidd's book 'Writing Creativity and Soul'

    If you aren’t familiar with Kidd, she’s the author of the novels The Secret Life of Bees and The Book of Longings and a bunch of other works of fiction and nonfiction. In Writing Creativity and Soul, she draws from her own experience as well as from other writers–Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Maya Angelou among them–to provide some practical and inspiring guidance for writers.

    One section of the book that stuck with me was the chapter “About Characters: Four Questions.” Kidd’s advice here is prompting me to think more deeply about the characters that populate my writing, especially the main characters and their nemeses. While Kidd’s focus is on novel writing, I find that the questions she raises can help short story writers flesh out their characters.

    Continue reading “Friday Five (minus one): on creating well-rounded characters”