All Categories

A Bowl Full of Nails earns bronze from Independent Publishers Book Awards

6/9/2015

I was just honored for the second time with an IPPY. The first IPPY descended on my earlier novel, Gates of Eden, a 60s tale of resistance, rebellion, and love. Now, A Bowl Full of Nails, a counterculture thriller becomes the happy IPPY recipient.

It's uplifting to be surprised by an award but I feel particularly simpatico with the organization that sponsors this award, Independent Publisher, a powerful voice in the independent publishing industry. Check them out here, including their award programs and the IPPYs.

In their 19th season, the IPPYs — the Independent Publisher Book Awards — honor the best independently published titles from around the world. The awards are intended to bring increased recognition to the thousands of exemplary independent and academic press titles published each year.

Good news for A Bowl Full of Nails and bravo! for the Independent Publisher Book Awards and the work they do to provide robust alternatives to corporate publishing.

0 Comments

CSULA television and film student captures essence of a collaboration

5/20/2015

0 Comments

When old friend, fellow traveler, and actor, writer, activist Peter Coyote invited me to join him in a reading at Barnes & Noble books in Los Angeles, Cal State LA student Ideth Hernandez was on hand to capture the moment and report the session for Cal State LA's "Arts & Letters — Firsts, Bests, & Onlys."

Ms Hernandez distilled Peter's and my joint reading session beautifully, caught the essence and message of our words and actions that night, and — perhaps most important — evoked the spirit of Peter's and my friendship. Bravo, Ideth!

Cal State LA's "Arts & Letters — Firsts, Bests, & Onlys."

0 Comments

Lit journal reviews my latest 'resistance novel...

5/8/2015

0 Comments

Literary critic Rachel Jagareski writes about A Bowl Full of Nails in Foreword Reviews, a quarterly trade journal.

BERKELEY, CA — May 15, 1969: It’s Bloody Thursday at People’s Park and street theater activist Gus Bessemer returns from his confrontation with the “pigs” with a butt full of birdshot and the need to skip town for a construction job a thousand miles away. In Charles Degelman’s A Bowl Full of Nails, Gus is served the titular breakfast by his live-in girlfriend the morning after he announces his solo travel plans. Foregoing this iron-rich snack, he hits the road for a transformative year with a mother lode of independent spirits in Montgomery, Colorado. Read more...

From fact to fiction: I tore down and rebuilt the building with the blue trim and false front. It became the town community center, featured as a main character in my novel reviewed here, A Bowl Full of Nails. I'm amazed and delighted to see the fact behind the fiction still stands.

0 Comments

Shedding Skin: a writing professor bares his alter ego

4/9/2015

0 Comments

I teach dramatic and narrative writing at California State University, but I’ve spent most of my life outside academia. As a student at Harvard, many of us became aware that America’s universities had become land-grabbing, ivory-towered, defense-research factories while outside their ivy-covered walls, there was a war to stop. The Free Speech Movement in Berkeley had led the way with this growing awareness, but universities around the world became — as they often had before — magnets for revolutionary thought and action. I was lucky to be there.

Upon graduating, I immediately stepped away from academia, determined to change the world through theater, music, and fiction. I would be vulnerable to the draft that was devouring young men as quickly as the U.S. military was destroying Vietnam. “It was a tough job,” I always admitted, “but somebody had to do it.” I left campus life to pursue an anti-career as political activist, actor, musician, writer, carpenter, gypsy trucker, and utopian anarchist.

Years later, I returned to university life, hungry for scholarship and knowledge. I also hoped to pass on what I had learned about resistance and the power of art as a tool for social change. In every class, a handful of my students took notice and began to ask questions that lay beyond the purview of my lectures on diction, grammar, and syntax.

In this brief interview — produced by students in Cal State LA’s Television, Film, and Media Studies program — I drop my role as writing teacher to speak about coming of age in the 1960s, performing in Cuba, about my participation in the resistance movements and art collectives and communes and the counterculture that arose— in the words of Bertolt Brecht — from those who practice their art “under the regime of bourgeois liberty.”

0 Comments

Bookpleasures.com Interview: Meet Writer & Editor Charles Degelman

1/20/2015

1 Comment

Bookpleasures.com welcomes as our guest today, writer & editor, Charles Degelman. Charles currently teaches narrative and dramatic writing at California State University, Los Angeles. Previously, he served as staff writer and editor at a Los Angeles-based educational organization while he produced original work for the stage and wrote fiction, screenplays, and political commentary.

In 2010, Charles edited A Voice From the Planet, an award-winning collection of international short fiction, published by Harvard Square Editions. Recent work includes Gates of Eden, a '60s tale of resistance, rebellion, and love. Gates garnered a silver medal from the 2012 Independent Publishers Book Awards. A Bowl Full of Nails, set in the counterculture of the 1970s, was a finalist in the PEN/ Bellwether Competition and will be published by Harvard Square Editions in February, 2015.

Charles lives in Hollywood with his playwright companion and four cats.

Norm Goldman — Editor and Publisher of Bookpleasures.com: Good day Charles and thanks for participating in our interview.

How did you get started in writing? What keeps you going?

Charles: I started writing as a teenager. I was an avid reader from the age of five and matured into an odd cross-up between rambunctious youth and book-buried recluse. I was fortunate to have grown up in a literate family and was surrounded by books. I still remember my father reading every novel written by Mark Twain, and listening to his voice grow distant as I dozed off.

My reading lead me to a sense of purpose about the written word, fiction and non-fiction. As a teenager I became a romantic about America, its egalitarian and transcendentalist history, the struggles of the working class, its great, industrial energy, its wilderness.

At fifteen, I began playing folk music and surrounded myself with the musicology of every rag, blues, holler, Appalachian ballad I sang, anything by Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, Dave Van Ronk and Big Bill Broonzy. And who was this guy named Howlin’ Wolf? Yes, it was music, but folk music is highly literate and informed my understanding of history and the power of the written word.

I keep writing for the same reason I kept reading — I have things I want to talk about. I think art is a powerful tool for social change and — although I assiduously avoid being didactic — I am motivated by the simple words of another writer, Bertolt Brecht who said “Change the world; it needs it.”

Read more...

1 Comment

Not Another Book Review: A Bowl Full of Nails

1/19/2015

0 Comments

BERKELEY, May 15, 1969 — Riot police carrying shotguns killed one bystander and wounded several protesters. When interviewed at the hospital, one protester observed, "getting shot in the ass has certain strategic connotations. One, it suggests that you had pissed somebody off. Two, that you are running away from that somebody. And three, that somebody has got the guns and you don't." All of those things were true at People's Park on Bloody Thursday.

This is the factual event that begins the fictional odyssey of Gus Bessemer, antiwar activist in Charles Degelman's new novel BOWL FULL OF NAILS (Feb, Harvard Square Editions). Gus, who goes to People's Park to protest w/guerrilla theater, is stopped in his tracks by the "Blue Meanies," riot police with shotguns and live ammunition. The next morning, while his girlfriend, Kate, is tweezing birdshot pellets out of his butt, Gus realizes it may be time to leave town. The "Man" is sure to come after him. Then Kate confirms he's on the list of protesters to be incarcerated in a new jail. He's strangely proud to have made that list.

Read More...

0 Comments

A Bowl Full of Nails earns bronze from Independent Publishers Book Awards

CSULA television and film student captures essence of a collaboration

Lit journal reviews my latest 'resistance novel...

Shedding Skin: a writing professor bares his alter ego

Bookpleasures.com Interview: Meet Writer & Editor Charles Degelman

Not Another Book Review: A Bowl Full of Nails

Archives

Categories