Good News
• My new nonfiction book, White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg will be published by City Lights in November 2010! Click [here] for a description of the book - and keep checking the Now section for regular updates on the book's progress.
"Peter Conners has given us a wondrous tale of picaresque adventure and authentic friendship – between Leary the trickster-explorer-scientist and Ginsberg the activist-bard-philosopher, two seminal figures who pioneered new pathways through the cultural maelstrom of the sixties."
--Ralph Metzner, co-author, with Ram Dass & Gary Bravo, of Birth of a Psychedelic Culture
• I recently completed a screenplay for Growing Up Dead which will heretofore be called, Growing Up Dead: The Movie. It's quite different than the book - really a fictionalized version that captures the spirit of the book and expands the story of some key characters (mainly Peter, Harry, Kelly, and Jay) during their senior year of high school. Imagine a cross between Dazed and Confused, Almost Famous, and the Grateful Dead Movie and you'll have a good snapshot of the film. So what happens next? Well, there's a great crew headed up by Producer/Director Mike Kolko who are hard at work making this film a reality. They've put together a comprehensive investment package about the project and are recruiting interested backers to get involved. If you're interested in hearing more, just shoot me a note and we'll go from there: phconners@hotmail.com
• Growing Up Dead is now available in a Kindle edition! Start those downloads here: [GUD in Kindle]
Growing Up Dead is a memoir about being a Deadhead and my time spent following the Grateful Dead in the late 80s and early 90s. Check out its page on Da Capo's website for complete information [Here] or the new [Growing Up Dead] web page. Download (and share with your friends!) a flier about the book here: [Growing Up Dead flier]. Listen to an in-depth interview about Growing Up Dead at [Keyhole Magazine]. Listen to a roundtable interview with me, NY Times music critic Ben Ratliff, and sociologist Rebecca Adams at [Soundcheck]. Listen to an interview complete with excerpt readings and Grateful Dead music conducted by Grateful Dead Hour host David Gans at [Dead to the World]. View a complete GUD reading from Books Inc. in San Francisco at [GUD Reading]. Listen to a review of GUD from NPR's "All Things Considered" at [NPR Review].
Check out the super cool Growing Up Dead promo book trailer [GUD Trailer]
While you're book shopping, I hope you'll also check out my novella Emily Ate the Wind. The book is available in hardcover and paperback through Amazon.com and all other booksellers. Of Whiskey and Winter. my prose poetry collection, is also available. And so is this cool anthology I edited called PP/FF: An Anthology.
I'm also thrilled to announce that White Pine Press will be publishing my follow-up poetry collection, The Crows Were Laughing in their Trees. The book will be out in spring 2011.
• Here are some places that my poetry, fiction, non-fiction, book reviews, and an essay were recently published or are forthcoming: The Yale Anthology of Younger American Poetry (Yale University Press), Greatcoat, Hotel Amerika, Pinstripe Fedora,Double Shiny, The Slush Pile, Redactions: Poetry & Poetics, Keyhole Magazine, Big Bridge, The Brooklyn Rail, Stone Canoe, Disquieting Muses Quarterly, The House of Your Dream: An International Collection of Prose Poetry, Online Writing: The Best of the First Ten Years, In Posse Review,Mosaico (Amman Jordan), New Madrid,Poetry International, The Bitter Oleander, Verse, Mid-American Review, Salt Hill, An Introduction to the Prose Poem (an Anthology from Firewheel Editions), the Snowvigate Anthology, Mississippi Review, After Image: A Journal of Media Art and Cultural Criticism, Diagram, elimae, Snowvigate, Fiction International (#'s 37, 38, and 39), LUNA, Slipstream, American Book Review, Paragraph, Quick Fiction, Sleeping Fish, Flights, Drunken Boat, Two Rivers Review, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, Unpleasant Event Schedule, Magazine Minima, The Potomac Review, Sentence (#s 4, 5, and 7), Multi-Storey, City Newspaper, ArtVoice and elsewhere. Literary journals exist to support new writing - usually on a shoestring budget, if any budget at all - so if you're interested, please purchase a copy to ensure that they stick around for a good, long while.
• Trader Riley is ready to go Furthur this summer...
Journal & Anthology Publications
• Keyhole Magazine published a chapter from my memoir, Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead in a recent issue. They also recorded an interview on the book conducted by editor and author Sam Ligon. Since Sam is a writer and also a Deadhead, the interview hits some great Dead topics as well as aesthetic points. You can listen to it online here: http://www.keyholemagazine.com
• The Yale Anthology of Younger American Poetry, a forthcoming anthology from Yale University Press, will feature 5 poems from Of Whiskey & Winter. The anthology will be edited by Jay Hopler and published in fall 2010. The early promo copy says,“This collection will feature the work of 50 of the most important and exciting younger American poets.”
• [Hotel Amerika] has released their fascinating "TransGenre" issue. My long poem Discussions with the Bridesmaid is included in the issue along with many other cool rule-bending pieces. The Hotel Amerika website describes this issue as having a "focus on work that explodes traditional boundaries of generic convention." The issues succeeds and, as usual, is beautifully constructed as well.
• The intrepid editors of [Greatcoat] have just launched issue #2. My poem, The Directions That We Move, is published in the issue, along with much other good poetry. The first issue of the journal marked an impressive debut on the literary scene and the second keeps that promise going... this is a journal to watch.
• First of all, Pinstripe Fedora is a great name for a journal. I don't even know why it's a great name for a journal. It just is. And I was happy to answer their request for poems with a few from my upcoming collection, The Crows Were Laughing in their Trees. Pinstripe Fedora is putting together a prose poetry, flash fiction, and general PP/FF issue for release in January, and it sounds like it's shaping up to be a good one. Check out their work to-date (and a few fashion tips) at: www.pinstripefedora.com
• Literary journals are all about fresh blood, new ideas, keeping the wellsprings well fed. So I'm happy to have a couple poems from my forthcoming collection,
The Crows Were Laughing in their Trees, featured in the very first issue of a new journal of prose poetry & flash fiction called
Double Shiny. Check it out at:
http://doubleshiny.com/•Flights will be publishing 3 poems from my forthcoming collection, The Crows Were Laughing in their Trees, in their next issue. The magazine is published by Sinclair Community College and has always leaned toward prose poems. Thanks to the editors there for asking for some poems and for being so kind as to accept them.
