Author: Brian Ellis

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ALL ANYTHING ANYONE live on Substack

My long-worked on Serial Novel All Anything Anyone is live on Substack!

ALL ANYTHING ANYONE

All Anything Anyone is the story of five best friends, Dungeons and Dragons players, shortly after high school and living on their own for the first time, falling into the world of parties and drugs.

I first finished this novel in 2019 and have struggled for many years where to place it. In its 2nd draft it was 1275 pages and over 350,000 words. After years of editing and cutting away I got it down to 1039 pages and 285,000 words, which is still much, much longer than agents or presses were willing to take a risk on. Friends and a few people who reviewed the book said that novel seemed to call out to be released serially, the way alot of the 19th century Dickens/Collins/Spofford’s books were released. So finally that’s what I decided to do. The Prologue is free to read on the Substack, and you can sign up for subsequent chapters. I will be releasing around 8-12 pages per week, and at that rate the books should be finished in about two years. I hope you’ll check it out!

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Fiction – Diaries in Pool Party Mag

Sam was older than me and one of her nipples was pierced and I did whatever she said. I was barely a person, more of an ill-fit together explosion of hair, limbs and teeth spilling all over, my body a gangly nest of messiness. We had met through friends of friends, she found me clinging…

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Fiction — Jumping Out Of Car Practice in Unstamatic Journal

Air whooshed into the car when Brian opened the passenger side door of my ’96 Ford Taurus and stuck his Doc Marten boot out above the moving pavement. Brian’s Doc Martens were hand-me-downs, scuffed and cracked and almost grey with age, the yellow laces laced all the way up and wrapped several times before being tied around Brian’s skinny leg just above the ankle, his cuffed jeans lifting as he stretched one leg out of the door.

 

LINK

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Interview — Abandon Journal Issue #4

An Interview With Brian S. Ellis

by Kimberly Sheridan

October 19, 2022

The poetry of Brian S. Ellis unravels, inverts, investigates, and complicates. His poems are radical koans and invitations to forego common narratives. In a review of Yesterday Won’t Goodbye, Jeanann Verlee writes, “His poems speak with an unbridled urgency yet come to you patient, coy, brimming with wisdom—and acutely aware of their own necessity.”

 

LINK

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Fiction — Security in COUNTERCLOCK Journal

Hamish lived on the opposite side of the country from his family, but he had never been on an airplane, he had moved by train. He was a romantic, but this time, there was urgency; his grandfather had died. So Hamish called the airplane company to purchase a ticket which he was told would be at the counter when he went. The airport was so much bigger than Hamish knew.

 

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Interview — Oregon ArtsWatch

Poet’s Q&A: Brian S. Ellis talks slam poetry, storytelling, and branching toward prose

The Portland poet sees his classroom role as more coach than teacher: “I am very good at pumping people up, listening, and helping them execute their vision…. I’m not hitting people with maxims to live by.”
DECEMBER 27, 2021

AMY LEONA HAVIN

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Book – Against Common Sense

Limit Zero Publications (2023)

 

Against Common Sense is a collection of poems. Against Common Sense is a collection of poems that thinks that complexity is a form of accuracy—which is to say, a form of honesty—and that simplicity itself is not a virtue; in fact, simplicity has been used many times as a form of violence. The poems in Against Common Sense do not think that there is a type of knowledge that a person can obtain that detracts from said person’s overall ability to think: this is the theory that is invoked when common sense is employed; that it is possible somehow that learning can separate us from ourselves; that learning is a dangerous activity that will leave us with less information than we began with. Against Common Sense is a collection of poems, it is hoped, that thinks. Against Common Sense is a collection of poems.

 

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Book – Pretty Much the Last Hardcore Kid in This Town

Alien Buddha Press (2023)

 

Pretty Much the Last Hardcore Kid in This Town is a series of interconnected short stories that blur the lines of perspective and identity. Focusing on the same collective of punk rock kids living in the early 2000s New England, each story contains shifts in status, power and self, as characters swap names and personalities, both literal and metaphysical.

 

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