A Poet's Guide to Divorce by David Breeden  ISBN: 0-9766652-9-8

Dad, JJ Wade, is a used bookshop owner. Son Buck is a screenwriter trying to make it on the west coast. Between them is the long shadow of a divorce. When Hollie Ivie, a Goth grrrl, becomes the obsession of JJ's life, Buck steps in with shock therapy-he steals Hollie. Mixing journals, email, and third-person narration, this novel tells the story of a wasted, bitter artist who still might pull it out, his son headed in the same direction, and a woman who doesn't intend to be owned by anyone. Where does Marcus Aurelius, the great Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher fit in? A frumpy professor and email, of course.



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An excerpt from  A Poet's Guide to Divorce

     “JJ wrote to live; he made no bones about it. It was odd, really, that he’d ever come to such a pass. He hadn’t been a particularly good reader as a child. He remembered proudly reading a book to his mother. Something about a dinosaur, he remembered. He had wondered for years why his mother hadn’t been impressed, until he realized she could barely read herself: She had not known if he was reading well or not.

Up until college JJ refused to read fiction because he considered it frivolous. He had read biographies, mostly. And history.

JJ couldn’t remember when he started writing in a serious, gut-level way. In high school he’d had a certain facility for writing satirical verse – cruel, funny things about teachers and jocks. He had not taken writing seriously then at all. He supposed the change had come early in college. As his drug use and loneliness increased, so did his need to communicate somehow.

He had built himself a desk out of a door and some milk crates. He put a small black and white television on it. And bought an electric typewriter.

His favorite thing to do in those days was to smoke some weed, drop some downer or other, crank up a Bob Dylan album on the stereo, watch some foreign film on PBS with the sound turned down, and write.

And write. With the words, the images, the drugs coursing through his brain.”
 

 

About the Author:

David Breeden has an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a Ph.D. from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi, with additional study at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. He has published eight books of poetry and four novels. His poetry and short fiction have appeared in such journals as Mississippi Review, Nebo, Poet Lore, Mid-American Review, North Atlantic Review, Boston Literary Review, Turnstile, Nidus, Paragraph, and New Texas. His short film House Whine was funded by the British Columbia Arts Council. His film Off the Wall won "Best of Fest" at the Great Lakes Film Festival. His newest book of poetry, Ice Cream and Suicide, was recently published by UKA Press in the United Kingdom.

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