This past summer during the rollout of The Sacraments of Blackgum Lake (Lethe Press), I had the opportunity to share a few thoughts with Amanda Stevenson-Holmes for her South magazine story, “Three Paths to the Page.” Our discussion dipped into my experience as an educator, but mainly focused on the tension between “day-job” obligations and artistic endeavors—how “friction fosters fiction.” Pick up a copy of the fall, 2026 installment of South at various locations on the southside of Indy, or read more here.
The recently-released anthology, Male Pattern Violence (CultureCult Press, 2026), contains my story, “The Gyrification of Violence.” Edited by the press’s founder, Jay Chakravarti, the story is a reprint-inclusion originally appearing in Vastarien: A Literary Journal (lamentably on indefinite hiatus, but hopefully in some dark hibernation).
“The Third of May 1808,” Francisco Goya (1814)
Male Pattern Violence houses thirty-five stories from an eclectic selection of contributors. “From the housing projects of France to the fishing villages of Bangladesh, from Victorian England to the digital wastelands of social media moderation, Male Pattern Violence traces the architecture of male violence: not as aberrations, but as a pattern, perpetuated consciously or otherwise, since time immemorial.”
“The Third of May 1808,” Francisco Goya (1814)
As for my own offering, the editor’s intro follows: “A single punch in a middle-school hallway, then decades of aftershocks. [Clint] Smith dissects male violence not as spectacle, but as a wound that never heals.”
