L.A. Man: Profiles from a Big City and a Small World
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016
We Dropped a Bomb on You: The Best of Slake I-IVOne Last Ride in the Old World
Originally published in the The Surfer’s Journal. By JOE DONNELLY The winter was dry, too dry, until it wasn’t. When the rains finally came, they kept coming. Slow, steady, torrential, a brief time out, a sliver of sun, and then the cycle repeated. In the springtime of the plague, it seemed that even the sun […]
Propelled on a Zephyr of Compressed Wind
CR Stecyk, the Smithsonian, and the first airbrushed surfboard. Originally published in the The Surfer’s Journal. By JOE DONNELLY Stored somewhere deep in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, along with other markers of pre-collapse American life gleaned from hundreds of years of material history, is a singular surfboard […]
Wrecking Crews: Remembering John Albert and his lost generation
Originally published in the Los Angeles Review of Books. By JOE DONNELLY I REMEMBER WHEN my relationship dynamic with the late writer John Albert went from being friendly acquaintances to something like the hipster Honeymooners. It was when my then-wife and I moved into a house up the street from John and his then-wife. It […]
The Passionate Conversationalist: On Scott Timberg’s “Boom Times for the End of the World”
Originally published in the Los Angeles Review of Books. By JOE DONNELLY ALTHOUGH IT RIGHTFULLY should be read as a celebration of his life and work, for those who knew and loved Scott Timberg, or just appreciated what he did and stood for, there is no separating Boom Times for the End of the World […]
Fetched Up in Amber
By JOE DONNELLY This piece originally appeared in the The Surfer’s Journal. PDF available here. M ike Purpus is waiting on the second step of the staircase that leads to his second-story apartment in South Redondo Beach. Purpus is used to waiting. He hasn’t had a driver’s license since he was a kid, so […]
Embracing the Despised Poems: Remembering Scott Timberg
SCOTT TIMBERG took his life on December 10, 2019, a fact that sits with me here unreconciled as I read the posthumously released Beeswing, his book with Richard Thompson. I’d probably be thinking of Scott even without this reminder of his passions, as I’ve thought about him every day since he killed himself, the way […]
Red Canary Magazine
Sponsored by Red Canary Collective™, Red Canary Magazine is an independently staffed and executed publication launched in collaboration with award-winning journalist and writer, Joe Donnelly. We provide space for difference-making work focusing on environmental, social justice and equity issues. While the need is urgent, we endeavor to approach our mission with humor, hope and humility. […]
The Confirmation of Danny Kwock
By JOE DONNELLY This piece originally appeared in the The Surfer’s Journal. PDF available here. Danny Kwock’s hair is long. Like, hippie long. This might surprise those who’ve leafed through the tome The Eighties at Echo Beach, or are old enough to have been there and remember when Kwock, Preston Murray, Jeff Parker, Peter […]
