Over the next 2 months I'll be doing some consulting work for NPR's Day to Day. My gig involves helping the Day to Day team think through a new blog called Daydreaming, which, as the show describes it, will look at the state of the California Dream:

Daydreaming is Day to Day's official blog. Over the summer we'll be showcasing the people, stories and issues featured in our new series, "California Dreamin'." The Golden State has brought the world new trends, new ideas, and new ways of life, but what happens to the California Dream when the economy's sluggish?

My own goals are pretty straight-forward: build a blog for the show (check); develop policies and procedures for said blog; develop a content and community strategy; work within the framework of NPR's existing tools and digital policies, as well within the more abstract framework of "NPR-ness." Come visit every now and then, and leave me a comment. Or, better yet, subscribe to the feed.

hey team,

As many of you know, I attended the Clarion West Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop last year. It was an amazing experience, and I walked away with great affection for the workshop and (strangely enough) Seattle, where the Clarion has been held for the 25 years.

Clarion is a non-profit, and the tuition students pay doesn't begin to cover the costs of putting up and feeding attendees (student and teacher) for almost 7 weeks in rather nice digs on the UW-Seattle campus. In order to offset costs, Clarion engages in the usual fundraising gambits, one of which involves getting alumni to shadow the workshop in what has been dubbed The Clarion West Write-a-thon. Over the next six weeks, a number of alums (including your droog and humble narrator) will be writing away in parallel with this year's workshop.

If you'd like to support/sponsor me over the next 6 weeks, you can do so here. My Write-a-thon goals are pretty modest - I need to revise 6 old stories and complete first drafts on 3 more - as are my fundraising goals. If 20 of you were to donate a buck a story - 9 in total - I'd be golden. (Those of you looking for more bang for your donated buck should consider supporting Michael Swanwick, who is on some kind of crazy streak that involves 80k+ words a Write-a-thon.) In addition to helping out an organization that has come to mean a great deal to me, you'd also be helping me out personally, as I would be more likely to stop procrastinating on these stories if I knew people I knew and liked had paid 9 dollars for them. As an added inducement, I'll be sending out the finished/revised stories to sponsors on a weekly basis.

Thanks in advance for your help, and for forgiving this intrusion into your blog-reading day. And (again) the donations page is here.

best,

gary/ebog

Apparently a piece I worked on while consulting at NPR's News & Notes last year won an LA Press Club award for Best Multimedia Package. Who knew?

The package is here. Congrats to my co-winners: Tony Cox, who hosted the radio segment, and Anthea Raymond who produced it.

buy this book

So I have a story/essay/memoir in the recently released anthology The Time of My Life: Writers on the Heartbreak, Hormones, and Debauchery of The Prom.

May 8, 2008--At about the same time my little sister was getting married three weeks ago – it was a lovely beach ceremony in the Florida Keys; she was beautiful, and I was teary, having the bittersweet privilege of subbing for our dead father on the walk up the aisle – food riots were breaking out across the picture-perfect waters at her back, on the island nation of Haiti. Putting the two together – a wedding and a riot – is more than an article-opening flourish: My sister and I were both born in Queens, N.Y., but our family is Haitian, and some of the relatives in attendance barely made it off the island in time for the nuptials.

Our cousin Leslie, a priest in a small, rural town north of Port-au-Prince, was not so lucky. He got all the way to the airport before being called home. His rectory had been broken into and looted by parishioners looking for stores of rice used by a church-administered meals program. ("A church!" some of the older ladies tut-tutted at the rehearsal dinner, as if the building's powers of sanctuary should have included the ability to bar hunger and desperation at the door.)

more over at The Root.

These pieces of mine appeared on The Root and in Bidoun Magazine recently.

hey folks,

I am swinging east for my sister's wedding, and will be making a stop in NYC on April 8th to participate in a reading for Bidoun Magazine. If you're free that night, it would be great to see you!

best,

e/g

--------------

Tuesday, April 8, 7pm
Bidoun Night @ The Kitchen, 512 West 19th St between 10th and 11th Avenues

_Bidoun: Arts and Culture from the Middle East_ presents an evening celebrating a triplet of telling objects, culled from the pages of its spring-and-summer issue.

Writer, film critic, and web theorist Gary Dauphin on the Cleaver Sleeve -- a revolutionary trouser design (circa 1975) by the soon-to-be-ex–Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver.

Bidoun Editor in Chief Lisa Farjam on the secret of her beating heart.

Writer Anand Balakrishnan on castrated pop singers, American imperialism, Arab mustaches, and the mystery of Naguib Mahfouz's white linen suit.

All this, plus --
Magic tricks!
Slide shows!
A harrowing journey to the Cairo Agricultural Museum!
A video by Ziad Antar!
And music by DJ/rupture!

This time, we discuss Tyler Perry, Rev. Wright and the (potential?) end of the chitlin circuit.

I also slip in a direct Alexyss K. Tylor name-check, as well as an encoded/oblique 2Girls1Cup reference. Not a bad day's work.

As explained by me, here.

Click over and give my numbers some love.

Don't lie, you google yourself, too. During a recent extended session with my results I discovered that some completely random Russian archive has the bulk of my Village Voice writing career stored on their database. (Anyone speak Rooskie who can tell what it is?) Anyway, it includes articles that don't show up on the Village Voice site and which aren't in Nexis, and in the interest of owning my digital footprint I'll be uploading to ebog.com periodically. Don't pay them any mind.

I've got new pieces in Bidoun and New Angeles Monthly this week. Go check 'em out.

Adios, 2007. You were a real bastard.

Websites I've built and managed, articles I've written and a few other things I've done. Under construction, as they used to say.

CLIPS