Excerpt From Upcoming Dave Housley Novel Hits The Rumpus
"It just all feels impossible. Pappas, who steals tape from the supply room, entire rolls of toilet paper from the bathroom closet, pens and microwave popcorn and Microsoft Word, standing here in his Dockers and Gap sweater, a millionaire? Cowens, who Robertson had to personally tell to stop saving porn to their cloud-based file storage? Mowery, with his weird Central Pennsylvania accent and his eBay store where he sells the motherboards they are supposed to be recycling, is worth eight point eight million dollars?"
In this Rumpus-exclusive excerpt from Dave Housley's upcoming novel The Other Ones, follow four of the principle characters in the novel as they discover that their detestable colleagues have become overnight millionaires. Artist, Lauren Kaelin, supplies original illustrations to accompany the excerpts.
Chastain and Craver are office friends and co-conspirators in cynicism, smoking together in the stairwell and poking fun at the fragile façade of the American office space. But, when their usual targets become recipients of one-way tickets out of daily drudgery, will they be able to sustain their cool detachment?
Robertson is a millennial a few years out of school toiling away in the company's IT department. His direct superior, Mowery, a MAGA-hat-wearing bud-light-swilling caricature of American intellectual indolence, is now a millionaire eight times over. While Chastain is already knee-deep in student loan and credit card debt, Robertson looks forward to years of honest toil and virtuous drudgery just to attain an iota of the stability Mowery has drunkenly stumbled into.
Russell is Robertson's foil, an old-timer who is long past caring about most anything other than keeping his head down and putting in whatever work he is mandated to perform.
Read about Chastain, Craver, Robertson, and Russell at The Rumpus HERE
And order The Other Ones HERE
Fiddlin’ Around in Ireland
Nothing buoys the spirits like a walk along Grafton Street. Gray day or sunny, it’s bright with noise and laughter. Loud “hellos,” babies crying, neighborly gossip, rich brogues and lilting Irish airs float up onto the breeze. Our chosen course allowed for a stroll through St. Stephen’s Green. Sunlight dappled the leafy brakes. Inspired by the moment, Lawrence liberated his fiddle and sawed out a hornpipe. He was joined in his performance by a pair of amorous ducks.
On Grafton street we were immediately surrounded by music. A couple of 9 and 10-year-old boys, Donald Reagon and Paul O’Neill, were delighting passersby with smooth moves on the fiddle and concertina. College students with shaved heads played sitars. Old men played jazz. A guitarist somewhere was plucking out George Harrison tunes and singing, “Here comes the sun, little darlin’ here comes the sun.”
On that musical street there was only one poet—a threadbare character who, for a pound or a punt (Irish pound) or nothing at all, would recite a poem by a poet of one’s choosing. I selected Yeats and was honored with “The Fiddler of Dooney”:
“When I play on my fiddle in Dooney, Folk dance like a wave of the sea . . .”
An Interview with Elizabeth Hazen, Baltimore Poet and Baker Award Finalist
Baltimore poet, Elizabeth Hazen’s first collection of poems is entitled Chaos Theories. Last week the young poet was announced as a finalists for the prestigious Baker Artist Award in literature. We sat down to talk with her about her experience in Baltimore as an artist and what programs like The Baker Awards mean to artists.
Elizabeth Hazen Announced as a Finalist for the 2019 Baker Award
This year, ASP’s own Elizabeth Hazen, author of the poetry collection Chaos Theories, is a finalist for the $10,000 literary honor. Hazen is a Baltimore resident and ardent supporter of the city’s burgeoning arts scene (named by Thrillist and Departures magazines as one of the best arts cities in America). She received her MFA from Johns Hopkins University and currently teaches English at the Calvert School in Baltimore.