BART SCHANEMAN @bartschaneman - Tumblr Blog

Author Bart Schaneman's book The Pot Job explores the underside world of pot dispensaries, theft, revenge, and the law.

On sale now!

Cover reveal!

THE POT JOB, a new novel, comes out on Sept. 16 and will be available for preorder on Aug. 16.

Denver, 2019: After one of their marijuana dispensaries is robbed, Taylor Hobson and Danielle Garcia hatch a plan to make back the money. When that ends in disaster, the two friends agree to allow their sales manager to implement aggressive and quasi-legal sales practices. Soon, their reputation as the go-to place to load up on marijuana beyond the legal limit spirals out of control.

Meanwhile, Henry Kaufman is back from a multiple-year stint in Asia. As he attempts to adjust to the reverse culture shock of returning to America, he bounces around, looking for a decent job. He asks his old friends for work at one of their dispensaries, and they agree to hire him as a budtender. He finally has the material to write the investigative journalism piece to make his name as a writer, but at what cost?

I wrote about what it was like when I moved back to my hometown in rural Nebraska and ran the newspaper there.

#nebraska #prose #scottsbluff

Old friends and a family vacation in Korea's second city.

I wrote a little about my favorite place to visit in South Korea -- Busan

#korea #travel

The only constant in life.

From the work in progress

I think back to my 20s and wonder if I did enough. Or if the few times I said no because I was saying yes to someone else I will never see again are going to haunt me endlessly. I am not Mary Oliver. The geese don’t inspire me. How could I ask anyone what they were doing to do with their own wild life when I’ll never know if I did enough with mine? Do you measure it in good times? Beautiful relationships? Lines on your face? Do we all get the hairline we deserve?

Someone probably told me how it feels to walk the streets in a hip neighborhood in a vibrant American city, to watch a young couple order to-go coffee then cross the street, the afternoon light perfectly illuminating their white sneakers and athleisure, to the dispensary. It’s Friday afternoon and you still have friends, but are they doing tonight?

Turn around. Look at your best days. It’s your daughter learning how to walk, to speak. It’s your wife and the trust you put in her. The young people go by on endless rented scooters. Good for them. Are they living more than you did at their age? It’s a question without an answer.

From a work in progress

I ride past the apartment where I was living when we met. I am learning how to write about the person I’m with, and not the people I’ve left, that I miss. You got lost on your way over, showed up with soju on your breath. Something I would have done. What a thing to admire. If I had listened to everyone who said give it time I would not be back in this city, on my way to meet an old friend, I mean a friend who is getting old and lives on this other side of the world. I wouldn’t be writing on these trains and buses with their windows fogged from breath and wet shoes and dripping umbrellas. This rainy Asian country. Someone else brought me here to find you and now we come back almost every year. The ginkgo trees still stink. The cars are still black and gray and white. And I wouldn’t understand it without you.

From the work in progress

We all used to see each other every weekend. We thought the community would be there forever. Now we wonder what each other is doing with their time. What have you been doing with yourself? Spouse overseas. Childless. Divorced. Why don’t we see each other? We text sometimes. Send each other memes and links to songs. You feel it, how the time pulls you toward steadily increasing degrees of loneliness.

One day you’re driving through the prairie, Budweisers between your thighs, and you pull off the dirt road and hike up a sandstone bluff and look out over the town. 19 and home from college. Grew up a few miles apart in the country. Saw the same tornadoes. Bonded like that forever. Brothers, in a sense. So maybe that’s why you feel like you’ll always know one another despite all the evidence to the contrary, how our parents are now.

I watch an Instagram story of a concert and see a guy wearing a flatbill hat with the same neckline. I still think we’ll know each other our whole lives.

As night fell neon signs switched on above every shop and business along the streets and alleys. The makgeolli man pushed his cart toward the park, his spoke-wheeled wagon loaded with trays of the milky pale bottles. He wore a rubber grin, a mask of pleasure in his wide smile hiding the pain that he carried for tomorrow. He pushed the cart on the walkway through the park and a pair of young men bought a bottle each and expertly flipped the bottles upside down and swirled them, making a cyclone of fermented rice wine before twisting the caps off and tossing them into the gravel and grass. They drank and exhaled through their teeth and drank again and leaned back to watch the man push on into the night calling “makgeolli! Saeng makgeolli,” his voice finally melding with the traffic and other low noises from the city.

#fiction #seoul #korea

wearepioneerspress

Folks! New Bart Schaneman book! Save the date!

Reposted from @bschaneman (@get_repost) ・・・ Reposted from @nkperkins.

The Silence is the Noise, a new novel by @bschaneman available from Trident Press, comes out on August 30th! Get ready. This is a good one! Cover art by @strangedirt

helloamerica

Bart Schaneman is a special one for us. Longtime friend. Like half-of-a-lifetime friend. Great goddamn writer. Excellent human. Author of some of our favorite works of modern Western literature, including his recently reissued debut novel, The Green and The Gold, from Trident Press. Buy that book. I mean, read the interview, sure. Do that. But buy the book immediately after. Then buy The Silence is the Noise, also out via Trident.

https://helloamericalit.com/f/read-this-interview-with-bart-schaneman-then-go-buy-his-books

adamgnade

Posted a bunch more of the lost Portland photos here.

Indigenous art is finally having its long-overdue moment in American culture. From TV shows Reservation Dogs and Dark Winds with predominantly Native American casts, to novels from Colorado writers like Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s Woman of Light and Stephen Graham Jones’ My Heart Is a Chainsaw, the range of Indigenous voices and perspectives has never been more […]

For the Boulder Weekly I interviewed Erika T. Wurth and wrote about her new novel White Horse.

The building they lived in, the square, red-bricked, three-story villa once had a convenience store on the first floor. She had helped him find it. Dealt with the real estate agents who spoke no English. The windows were old and when it rained the traffic from the busy street down the hill made it sound like they were sleeping next to a waterfall. This rainy Asian country. There was a taphouse in the basement and a bar next door where people would spill out and drink and drop glasses and cheer and argue. Before the shop became a bottled-beer store it was a regular store and outside at night they could hear the drunk salarymen playing the claw game, slapping and cussing the machine when it didn’t produce cigarettes. They lost all the time. The water pipes were on the outside of the building, and when it would get really cold he had to make sure to keep the hot water flowing to the heating system under the floor or the pipes would freeze. The lady who ran the store told him what to do. She also got drunk one day making kimchi and gave him bags of it. The next time he saw her she was embarrassed, pointed to the makgeolli bottles in the trash. Another foreigner lived below him who had been in the country for decades and wore only traditional clothes as though he was cosplaying an ancient native.

He came back ten years later and sat at the railing of a wine bar across the lane that wasn’t there when he lived there. Of course it was raining. This rainy Asian country. It had been coming down for hours. He sat there and watched the people go by with their umbrellas. Young couples on dates exploring the neighborhood. Groups of young women ducking into the bar or down the steps of the brewery expertly folding up their umbrellas at the exact right time to avoid getting wet. Not even a drop landed on them. Motorcycle delivery drivers raced fried chicken up the street. He could see the people in the German-owned bakery next door where T. had said no one had ever gotten a good meal. He was jealous of the men younger than him that he saw out on the town. He had been them, and he knew that those years were a high point in his life. To be single and free in a place like this. This rainy Asian country. To live in this exciting hell. To hear the rain through the bad windows at night. He knew he wouldn’t ever have this again, and that he was doomed to chase that feeling the rest of his life. T. had told him not to leave, that he would regret it. That was true. He had done many things in the time since he left that he valued, that were important to him. But still he wondered who was living up there now, in that place with the bad pipes, listening to this rain through the windows. What were they doing with their lives? And do they know what it means while they live there?

He sat there and watched the people going up and down the lane and thought about his own place in the world, and if it was true that he was exactly where he needed to be. Like someone had stitched it in needlepoint on a couch pillow. Or if he just went where the world pulled him. It didn’t matter. He was living for other people now. And maybe that’s all that apartment really was — the last place where he had lived only for himself. When he was single and selfish and thought he was free. When he thought he was free.

#fiction

Drive into this city from the east and the north. Two seekers in a car looking to find the dark peaks to their right. Young creatures with no form, thoughts or opinions. Into this city on land more plains than mountains. More midwest than west. Into the middle of the neighborhoods where decades ago the jazz horns blew all night, and now the dance music comes from the wires overhead. Seeking more life than what back home could give. To walk these streets canopied with trees past mansions of history unknown and never to be told, haunted parks that were once graveyards, the sidewalks paved over bones. To leave behind all that sad open land, the lonesome landscape, to find even more isolation among the crowds who come anew everyday with the same rented trucks and the same dreams, like rural refugees washing up on the shores who just crossed an unforgiving ocean of grass.

Smoke rises beyond the two peaks, mountains that ages before the car and the town and the city, before these white people, these two peaks guided tribes home. It’ll be years before these two even know the names the white people gave them and they’ll never know their first names. Only that they’re west of the city and rising above the ridgeline that they won’t see unless they stand on rooftops or climb trees. They’ve forgotten how to climb trees. And where is all the water? Where are even the lakes? The rivers? One stream of flat water trickles through the city in a foreboding toxic run that no one braves unboated.

Hope from the bars and the first jobs and the first friends. Each choice, each yes, closes off all others behind and splinters into a cracked web of paths ahead. So much freedom. So little money. At least the city feels welcoming. The skies are iridescent blue in the afternoon, the sun there for everyone to take. If only the stars would shine their lights, too, then they might know the way back home. But they’ve made a vow to each other. They’re never going home, no matter what happens. Home is now the journey, and the trip goes on until it’s over. So just keep driving.

#fiction

Boys on a boat. 2011. (at Vang Vieng) https://www.instagram.com/p/CVoAcd_L3VJ/?utm_medium=tumblr

View this post on Instagram

Everybody came out to watch the tornado. Got to see all my neighbors. (at Johnstown, Colorado) https://www.instagram.com/p/CP1tX7-hDCd/?utm_medium=tumblr

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

BART SCHANEMAN