Publication Studio

Publication date: March 2013 Press: Publication Studio Format: Paperback Language: English ISBN: 9781624620140 Buy Synopsis In the shadow of the Boeing plant where the first commercial jet liner was assembled, a family lives in a house in a rural landscape filled with stumps, streams chocked with the dead salmon, and no one who can help. The sixties in Renton, Washington were a mix of jet age technology and subsistence farming. Roger Carnation at an electrical engineer, or double e, is a stepfather who regards his new family as an acquisition. He has daughters to train to do what he needs. He has a wife to clean house and prepare food. He has a son to train as a replacement man. The novel is told through the five points of view as the story advances toward its inevitable end. ...

Shoot the Buffalo Publication date: December 2005 Press: Clear Cut Press (out of print) Press: Publication Studio Portland Format: Paperback Language: English ISBN: 0972323473 Buy Publication Studio Dzanc eBook Winner of the American Book Award, 2006 Nominated for a Washington State Book Award, 2006 Synopsis The summer Aldous Bohm turns nine, his parents move to the woods near Snoqualmie, Washington, “to reinvent the American family.” The Bohm’s are working class hippies in post-Vietnam America. Their makeshift pastoral takes shape in a haze of pot smoke and good intentions and ultimately births a vortex of personal insecurity and romanticism taking the family deeper into the woods to destroy them. Aldous oversees these tragedies, recalled a decade later, after he has left Snoqualmie to join the military in the buildup to the first Gulf War. Sweeping in scope yet unerringly precise in its detail, Shoot the Buffalo conjoins the dead end narrative of American masculinity with its stubborn twin - the Romantic ideal of nature - to suggest an ambivalent way forward, a path out of these woods. ...

Publication date: January 2010 Press: Publication Studio Portland Format: Paperback Language: English ISBN: 9780615332918 Buy Publication Studio Dzanc eBook Synopsis An Army Reservist, Ben Wallace, is a reluctant member of the U.S. Army Reserve. Yet, when he is called to duty in Operation Desert Shield, he realizes he wants to experience what his grandfather calls, “The Enlightenment of War.” He initially joined the Army as a form of rebellion against his father—a Vietnam era draft dodger—and as a way to be closer to his grandfather. His grandfather is a veteran of Guam. Wallace needs to experience combat, he thinks, to make himself a man. ...

Publication date: March 2013 Press: Publication Studio Portland Format: Paperback Language: English ISBN: 1624620663 Buy Publication Studio Paperback Synopsis Virility Rituals of North American Teenage Boys tells stories set at the boundary between real men and boys in man drag. In the title story, a man tells the various myths associated with his manhood from the Breakfast Club inspired obsession with “Elephantitis of the nuts” to an unexpected bodily testing sequence executed under the fluorescent glare of middle school lights. The characters in the fourteen stories live in the shadow of a failed macho culture. These stories have appeared in Birkensnake, The Chicago Review, Filter Magazine, MonkeyBicycle, Roethke Readings, Spork, and TRNSF Magazine. The Review of Contemporary Fiction wrote of Briggs’ stories, “As with the songs, the stories are all about life out of kilter, told with charm from the perspective of the odd as norm, not so much magical realism than delightfully pernicious absurdity.” ...