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The Department of Tangents Podcast

Years ago, playing a sort of improv game with friends in which we all picked super powers based on our personalities, I dubbed myself “Tangent Lad.” I was not a very strong superhero, and I could not defeat a super villain on my own, but I could distract them with Monty Python quotes and football trivia. I have many times since apologized to an interview subject in my capacity as a journalist by saying, “I am either very good or very bad at tangents, depending on how you feel about tangents.”

I had a rough time coming up with the concept and naming this blog/podcast. I knew I wanted to create a place where I could address things I’m passionate about – comedy, music, and horror. Finding a name that communicated all three of those things proved a bit impossible. I bugged my friends, and they all tried to help. To no avail. Then I thought, maybe I’m approaching this from the wrong angle. Maybe my lack of focus should be the focus.

As a journalist, I have written for The Boston Globe since 2000, starting out writing CD reviews and then writing a regular column on comedy for seven and a half years. I still contribute there, and to Kirkus Reviews, and other publications. I’m also a musician, and released my debut full-length album, Blue Skies and Broken Arrows, in March of 2015. And I’ve been publishing short horror fiction for a couple of years.

I like to climb into things I love and see how they operate. That’s what the Department of Tangents is for. The main thing here is love. To talk about the things that make I’ve loved forever, and some new things that might stand the test and be around, at least for me, for decades to come. I’ve had to be critical in my writing at times, and it might not all be nonstop roses here, but in the end, what I really want to talk about is the good stuff. That’s why I will regularly write about things I think are “Perfect,” even if someone can demonstrate empirically that they are flawed. Still perfect to me.

Also, fish.

I hope you, dear anonymous surfer person, will come to expect only the highest-quality, free-range, grass-fed tangents. And I hope some of you love the same things I do and find it useful. Or at least a welcome distraction until the others get here.

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  2. DoT EP104: Author Matt Moore on Personal Apocalypse, Brevity, and Brain Chemistry, plus New Music from Steve Poltz

DoT EP104: Author Matt Moore on Personal Apocalypse, Brevity, and Brain Chemistry, plus New Music from Steve Poltz

Aug 28, 2019

This is the third and final interview I recorded at NECON 2019, which I have previously described as a mashup of a horror writers conference and summer camp with adult beverages. I attended NECON for the first time in 2018, and this week’s guest, Matt Moore, was my roommate. Lucky for me, he is also a fine and thoughtful writer. His debut book is It’s Not the End (and Other Lies), a collection of short stories about what Moore calls personal apocalypses. What Moore means by that is that these stories aren’t necessarily about the apocalypse writ large with zombies or the annihilation of the human race, although it doesn’t exclude those possibilities. They are more about a moment when a character is facing the end of their life as they have known it so far. There are elements of sci-fi, horror, and what has come to be known as speculative fiction. I would highly recommend picking it up. It is on the Toronto-based Chizine Publications, which has featured the work of some wonderful authors, including Gemma Files, Helen Marshall, Bracken Macleod, David Demchuk, Christopher Golden, Stephen Graham Jones, Paul Tremblay, Ed Kurtz, and many more.

Moore and I took a deep dive on a few of the stories in It’s Not the End, and also the craft of writing short stories. It’s a magical art all its own, different from writing novels. Moore found a great quote for it, which he says in the conversation, “Short stories writers are like someone who knows how to make one cookie.” The stories in this book are concise, and they stop at exactly the moment the story is over. Which sounds obvious, but is a difficult thing to navigate in writing. Moore had another great quote for that he heard recently. “Perfection isn’t when you can’t add anything more, perfection is when you can’t take anything more away.” Moore is currently working on a new novel, and I’m looking forward to see how he applies that to a longer work.

I was happy to have gotten to read Moore’s work and to have gotten to speak with him at NECON. You can hear a bit of the conference going on in the background. When we started the conversation, we were in an out-of-the-way spot where people weren’t gathering. But there are giant bags of books that each attendee gets with their admission price, and people were scavenging the leftover bags behind us at one point. So you get a little bit of a feel for the festive and active atmosphere of NECON. Based on the joy of the folks around us, we got into a bit of the psychology of horror writers.

You can find out more about Moore on his website at <a href="https://mattmoorewrites.com/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">www.mattmoorewrites.com</a>, on <a href="https://twitter.com/mattmoorewrites" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Twitter</a>, Instagram, and Facebook under @mattmoorewrites. You can find ChiZine Publications on their website at <a href="https://chizinepub.com/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">www.chizinepub.com.</a>

Also, if you make short horror films, we’ve got the Daily Horror Film Fest coming up in October, for which I present a new short horror film every day throughout the month. I am currently open for suggestions for your favorite shorts as I put together the 2019 edition. I will write about each one, and interview some of the filmmakers to give a bit more depth.

Our featured track this week is “Windows of Halifax” by Steve Poltz from his new album, Shine On. I caught up with Poltz at Club Passim in Cambridge last week, and he will be the subject of next week’s episode of the Department of Tangents. You will hear a bit about the background of this song in that episode. Poltz can write an earnest song or a write with a sense of humor, two things that can sometimes feel at odds, at least emotionally. There is a wistfulness in this song to start, but then you get to this kind of gonzo middle section, in which two windows are talking about their plight, and the unsavory occupants of their houses. Poltz was born in Halifax, spent a lot of time in California, and now lives in Nashville, and that means sometimes his accent changes in weird ways. You can hear that in the conversation between the windows on this song, and I am fairly sure I will never get the opportunity to write that sentence again. Find out more about Steve Poltz at <a href="https://poltz.com/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">poltz.com</a> and on Twitter under <a href="https://twitter.com/stevepoltz" rel="noopener" target="_blank">@stevepoltz</a>.