So here’s a funny story about how weird life is right now:

I get back from a long night out with pals at SXSW, and Meg is on the couch reading Texas Monthly. (We’re subscribers.)

I’m in the can, and all the sudden I hear this little squeal come from the living room.

“Your book’s in Texas Monthly!!”

And just like that, our first review. The magazine had been sitting on our coffee table for at least 3 days.

Thanks Mike Shea!

UPDATE: What’s even cooler about this is that Marc Burckhardt (fellow Austinite and very nice guy) did the awesome Selena cover.

“Blackout Poet” on Youtube

The awesome guys at Texas Country Reporter uploaded our show from last year to YouTube — it’s a really nice piece. Those guys are a class act. Thanks Dan, Mike, Ryan, and Bob!

Here’s a photo of Ryan and I working on the “blackout” shots:

See more photos from the shoot.

Brea McAnally was kind enough to send me some pictures of my work in the “Old Media/Old News” exhibit at The Luminary Center for the Arts in St. Louis.

The show has been getting some really good reviews, which makes me even sadder that I won’t be able to see it in person. Here’s the Riverfront Times:

Yesterday’s headlines are re-presented in traditional (old) media by a group of local and international artists in this inventive elegy to the death of print journalism. Idiosyncratic, methodical processes seek to replace or reclaim the generative grind of tangible print….Writer Austin Kleon uses a Sharpie to black out the majority of text on a page, suggesting that what’s left reveals poetic insight into otherwise prosaic reportage….Fact, here, becomes marginalia, while emotional and personal experiences surface as all that’s most articulate, memorable or worth remembering.

More pictures, some lifted from The Luminary’s Facebook page:

If any of you St. Louis folks still haven’t seen it, it’s open until March!

The content of this interview I did with Nate Burgos over at Design Feaster might be familiar to anyone who’s read my posts about blogging before, but you might want to take a look anyways.

On why I started a blog:

When you’re a writer in college, you have the ultimate luxury: a captive audience. Your teachers get paid to read your writing and your classmates pay to read your writing. And then, suddenly, you get out of college, and nobody gives a crap anymore. So you start a blog!

On my hatred of computers:

This might be blasphemous for a blogger to say, but I don’t like spending more time in front of a computer screen than I have to. The good stuff comes from your hands and your head. (The cartoonist Lynda Barry says, “In the digital age, don’t forget to use your digits!” A blog is just a delivery system—a way to get eyeballs looking at your stuff (and minds thinking about it).

Read more here

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Take a few minutes to watch this really fantastic video of the winners of the Oklahoman’s newspaper blackout poetry contest that I judged. They’re all fantastic, but when the winner, Rose Gorr, an 80-year-old grandmother of 33 (!) reads her poem it gives me chills! A round of applause to everybody: the poets, The Oklahoman, Tanner Herriott who shot the video, and especially Yvette Walker who co-ordinated the whole thing!