My first poetry, chapbook, Front Man, has generated some positive press. Go Lackawanna/The Weekender ran an article this week. It can be read here. Last week, Electric City ran an interview with me, which can be read here.  

Furthermore, after doing a reading in Boston at a new Borders over the weekend, I’m having my first local reading tonight at 7 pm at the Vintage Theater, located at 119 Penn Ave. The event is free, and I’ll have books on hand to sign.

Over the last few years, I’ve drifted in and out of writing groups in the Philadelphia and Scranton areas. Some of them merely dissolved because the group’s members either moved away or just stopped writing. Some of them I left because they were more like group therapy sessions. But once I finished graduate school, I knew I needed a writing group in order to keep writing and gather feedback on my poetry.

I’m now part of a writing group that I enjoy. We meet the first and third Monday of every month at the Vintage Theater, located at 119 Penn Ave. in downtown Scranton. This group is only a few months old, but thus far I’m impressed by the feedback different members of the group give each other’s work. I also enjoy the age range of people that show up. So far, we’ve had high schoolers, college students, and middle-age folks working on memoirs or poetry collections. We’ve even had some folks bring their application essay for graduate school. So, if you’re looking for a writing group, I recommend this one. All genres are welcome, and again, we meet the first and third Monday of every month at the Vintage Theater, starting at 7 p.m.

Hey folks! I’m about to hit the road and really start promoting Front Man hard over the next several weeks. I hope some of you can come out to one of these readings. The mini-tour starts this Friday in Boston. Here’s a list:

 

Every year, during the beginning of winter, I like to hunker down with a novel and take a break from reading poetry for a while. Every November or December, I tend to reread a novel by Thomas Wolfe, my favorite author of fiction. I started this tradition as a way to remember the first time I read his famous novel Look Homeward, Angel. This happened during a winter break in college, and I was immediately awe-struck by his long, ambitious sentences filled with beautiful, poetic lines describing the novel’s rural North Carolina town and protagonist Eugene Gant’s burning desire to leave his hometown and establish a name for himself.  I still feel that novel is one of the best American coming-of-age stories told.

This year, I’m rereading The Web and the Rock, Wolfe’s third novel. I’m doing this because I don’t remember the book as well as his other novels. This time, I’m going to read it slower so I do remember the scenes.

Besides The Web and the Rock, I’m also reading Samuel Hazo’s poetry collection Sexes: The Marriage Dialogues. This is a great collection, one I read a few years ago and I’m now going back to. Several of the poems contain arguments between a married couple that involve everything from the way a table is set before dinner to a decision to buy a new car. The form is especially interesting to me because Hazo uses clipped, jagged lines throughout several of the poems. He also centers the poems around dialogue as a way to focus on the language of argument, gender differences, and tension.

I hope the rest of you find a good novel or poetry collection to enjoy during these coming winter months. If you feel like committing to classic literature and a great American novel, then I suggest one by Thomas Wolfe.

Halloween is in two days, and I assume a lot of people will partake in costume parties and events all weekend. But if you’re still unsure what you want to be for Halloween, then maybe the annual Dead Poets Reading will help spark your imagination. Hosted at Anthology New and Used Books at 515 Center Street in Scranton, PA, the event encourages local writers and poetry fans to dress up as their favorite deceased poet and read a few lines. I’ve been going to this event for a few years now, and I’m always impressed how well people pull off costumes of Poe, Plath, Sexton, Kerouac, Frost, Whitman, and a slew of other favorites.

The event starts at 7 p.m. and will also feature prizes for best costume! So, dress up and stop by to share the wise words of one of your favorite poets.

Happy Halloween!

This weekend, I took a bus to NYC to catch up with some friends, and one of the places we visited was The Poets House, located at 10 River Terrace  in Lower Manhattan’s Battery Park City. Basically, this is a building with shelves and shelves of poetry books (over 50,000 volumes according to the website) that the public can read when they visit. What impressed me most about the venue is the Poet House Showcase at the front of the massive library that features several new books published within the last year. For poets to have a chance to showcase their work like this is quite an amazing opportunity! Furthermore, once the year passes, the books are then placed on the shelves in back and remain there for visitors to browse. The venue also has a pretty extensive collection of literary journals, so for anyone looking to get published, the venue provides an invaluable service of allowing writers to browse the latest issues of journals free of charge.

There’s also several workshops and readings that go on throughout the year. Recently, the Poets House hosted Nick Flynn, Kevin Young and current U.S. Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin. I’m still a little bummed that I missed Kevin Young and Nick Flynn read together.

In addition, my thesis mentor from graduate school and a great poet, Neil Shepard, is doing a workshop that runs until Nov. 9.

New Yorkers are so lucky to have a space in their city that supports writers so much and allows the public to just come in and pick up any of their books. If I lived in NYC, I’d probably visit the place a few times a week to write and read while I looked out at the gorgeous Hudson River and the Statue of Liberty in the distance.

My friend Tez took some pictures, so you can get an idea how spacious this place is.

Hey everyone. My first chapbook of poetry, Front Man, was offiically released today!

If you’re interested in reading this collection of rock ‘n roll narrative poems, there are a few ways to pick up a copy. You can order it by clicking here, which is Big Table Publishing’s website, or you can contact me via bfanelli84@gmail.com and give me your mailing address. I’ll then mail you a copy.

Or you can come to one of my readings in the next few months and get one there.  I’m having a book release party/reading on Nov. 18 at 7 p.m. at the Vintage Theater, located in my hometown of Scranton, PA, 119 Penn Ave.

I’ll also be  reading up in Massachusetts, and then I have several readings in Pennsylvania. For a list of my future readings, check out the events page on my website.

My first poetry chapbook, Front Man, is going to published by the end of the month by Big Table Publishing.  The book has already gotten a few reviews, and some of these will be posted on the back of the book as blurbs.

“Punk rock embroidered with an artist’s eye for ironies and a pop culturist’s fetish for detail, the personal life of Brian Fanelli gets the rock star treatment here, in twenty nine brutally honest renderings of his opened veins. For those who were part of the scene anywhere from the late eighties to the new millennium, these works will drop you in the mosh pit of frenzied, alienated youth. If Henry Rollins and Robert Frost collaborated, their song would sound like this.” — Christopher Reilley, autor of the forthcoming chapbook Grief Tattoos

 

“Brian Fanelli’s Front Man traces the chronology of a lead singer’s rise into the punker limelight and his eventual return home. Throughout the book, we meet characters from the 2nd generation of the punk-rock scene such as the anonymous front man who “screamed into the mike until his throat swelled,” the girlfriend “thrashing to Johnny Ramone’s buzzsaw guitar sound,” and Eggroll Eddie who “smashed bodies in the [mosh] pit.” Fanelli’s poems bring a world to life that most of us have never inhabited: at their best, the poems delve deeply into individual scenes and find the vivid language, active syntax, and rhetorical strategies that deliver an emotionally-charged version of the punk-rock story. By book’s end, he discovers a meaningful order that highlights the tensions between generations, within the punk-rock scene itself, and within the protagonist who grows to full adulthood and trades in his Stratocaster for a teacher’s shirt and tie, for a high school gig where he’ll inspire the next generation of outliers and misfits to rise above, rise above. Open this book and prepare for a wild ride with power chords and smashed guitars, punches and combat boots to the face, mixed with pervasive nostalgia and self-knowledge that come from looking back at youth from the far side of maturity.” — Neil Shepard, editor of Green Mountains Review and author of the poetry collection This Far from the Source.

“Brian Fanelli’s Front Man is a rattling, howling, dumpster diving, beer bottle-littered romp through the punk-rock infused world of Chucks, Mohawks, bloody noses and broken jaws. But it is also a tender, sober coming-of-age poetic narrative riffed in two-minute tracks that reminds the reader how close the profane echoes the sublime—and how that echo follows us, red-eyed and alive all the way to the exit.” — Tony Morris, managing editor of Southern Poetry Review and author of the poetry collection Back to Cain.

So, I finally caved in and opened a blog. I’m primarily going to use this to talk about various literary events going on in the Scranton area and discuss my own writing process.

Speaking of literary events, I want to mention that the writing group I helped create will meet tonight at 7 pm at the Vintage Theater on Penn Ave. We started this back in August, and since then, we’ve had a new member every other meeting or so. I’m especially impressed with the group because of the variety of genres we’ve had, everything from entrance exams for graduate school to poetry to fiction. The folks that show up are serious about writing and generally want encouragement and advice to improve their work. How wonderful to have something like this in this community, and I think most of us go home after the meeting feeling even more encouraged to write.

This weekend was also significant because it marked the Second Annual Pages and Places in downtown Scranton. The event brought writers, academics, and intellectuals from all across the country to our city. The most popular panel featured atheist and public intellectual Chrisopher Hitchens and West Scranton native and novelist Jay Parini. They debated everything from the Iraq War to the most important texts that shaped American life and argument.  I had forgotten that Hitchens, generally a man of the left, had defended the Iraq War prior to the invasion and he still does today. He’s even good friends with one of the architects of the war-Paul Wolfowitz. Strange huh? His argument mostly rests on the belief that Saddam Hussein posed a severe threat to the region and murdered his own people.

The event featured several other panels and readings at the courthouse. I also worked with the folks at Barrelhouse Magazine to host a reading at Anthology Books that featured readers from Keystone College, Wilkes University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program, and Barrelhouse.  The event was standing room only, and I hope in the future Pages and Places continues to grow and spawns other off-site readings. Scranton needs this.

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