February | 2013 | James Brega: What I Write Instead of Nothing

James Brega: What I Write Instead of Nothing

Have you ever driven up the California coast from San Luis Obispo to Monterey, knuckles white on the steering wheel as you fight for control of the car through hairpin curves? Have you ever dreamed that you had murdered someone and, upon waking, been unable to shake the conviction that it was true? Have you ever sung onstage to a packed audience, been robbed at gunpoint by a ten-year-old, laughed when it seemed— for a moment—that a famous author had stolen your mojo, wondered why we don’t drive steam-powered automobiles, or confronted your guardian angel at high tide on a gay beach once claimed by Pilgrims ? In What I Say Instead of Nothing, James Brega invites you to explore his real, imagined, and re-imagined experiences through his collected essays and short stories—a journey that will feed your nostalgia for life at the end of the twentieth century and remind you how desperately you wish that a great deal of it had never happened.

A New Story in the Canadian journal Plenitude

February 17, 2013

I’m thrilled to be able to announce that my short story, “Five Years and Four Months,” has just been released in the Spring,
2013 issue of the Canadian journal Plenitude. It’s an AIDS memoir about my relationship with Ralph Gomez, who died on December 7, 1990 at age 40. It’s taken two years of writing, re-writing, editing, and further re-writing to shepherd the story to this stage: in fact, the core of it is one of the first stories I ever wrote, and I did a public reading of a version of it at a special Christmas event two years ago. My writing circle partner, Alice Lowe, and Plenitude editor Andrea Routly deserve my gratitude for their advice and guidance in helping me make the story publishable.

Plenitude is an online subscription journal (www.plenitudemagazine.ca) so it will cost you $10 (Canadian) to be able to read the whole journal for a year (two issues). For those of you who can’t or don’t want to make the investment, I’ve provided a link to my story below. I hope you find it worthwhile!

Read “Five Years and Four Months” here.

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