ddg

Danny Goodman’s fiction and nonfiction has appeared in various publications, and his novella, Somehow There Was More Here, was published by Found Press. He was the recipient of a writer-in-residence fellowship from Rivendell. When not writing, he edits for the WNBA news site, Winsidr. He lives in New York with his wife, a book editor, and their editorial cats. Currently at work on a novel, he is badly in need of a nap.

[dannygoodmanwriting]

“Mets fans live to dread, and the weather in New York provided the perfect backdrop—with gray skies and ominous thunder rolling in the distance—either for the climactic scene of a gothic novel or the return of Matt Harvey to the mound—Willets’ very own Heathcliff.” - Sergei Burbank, “Dread, then Sunlight, then (possible) Dread”

[dannygoodmanwriting]

Baseball isn’t linear — it’s more an evolutionary bramble bush where you have twisting and turning and circling back, and it’s hard to see where one thing begins and one ends.

Jay Caspian Kang, “As Baseball Considers Change, It Should Look to Its Past”

[dannygoodmanwriting]

Love that these little things exist. Thank you to everyone for your amazing support! 

Stop by Found Press or their Etsy store if you’re interested in a copy, and spread the word! Keep rocking waffles, my friends.

[dannygoodmanwriting]

If the writer-genius I once idealized was substantial and authentic, then the actual writer was a whole set of personalities that were constantly circling each other. The role of the writer is often not considered a 'role' because performing as a writer is close to hand. The one who writes sits alone with her text and works hour after hour, year after year, alone with the words, searching for the word inside the word and the shine that will arise from them. It’s a solitary act, like reading, and that, like reading, might lead to a book. It’s difficult work that also isn’t really work, neither a part of working life or the market economy. But the question is whether the writer with a capital W, her body and life and experiences, have become more in demand than what she has written.

Karolina Ramqvist, in @lithub

[dannygoodmanwriting]

He isn’t crying exactly. There’s a welling up of something. He’s riding the swell of emotion that feels too large for him to tamp down. It’s buoying him up.

Brandon Taylor, “Frites,” in Little Fiction

[dannygoodmanwriting]

How we romanticize the tragedy of baseball. Its protean nature appeals to the obsessive, the vainglorious, the xenophobe alike, as they all see only what they choose to: harbinger of social change, or preserve of the old and traditional… The American story has been one of incessant consolidation. As separate cities were becoming the five boroughs of a single New York City in 1898, so the disparate competing professional baseball leagues took their first halting steps toward consolidation around 1901. When semi-professional teams commingled with amateur and company teams, allegiance to a team involved geography. Gone are the Brooklyn Tip Tops, Brooklyn Bushwicks, and Brooklyn Bandits; all that matters now are the thirty teams that constitute MLB’s top echelon. People want to know where the Cyclones fall in the New York Mets’ organizational chart, because they want to know when these hits will happen in Flushing — that is to say, when they will matter. But for me, these are the only hits that do.

Sergei Burbank, “Five Baseball Games, Seven Synonyms for God, and Nine Innings”

[dannygoodmanwriting]

So very excited to have these small lovelies out in the world, courtesy of the most wonderful @foundpress.

If you do happen to order one, send me a private message on here or Twitter (or email) and let me know... for every copy sold, I'll be donating $2 to either @plannedparenthood or the ACLU  (your choice!). Thanks to y'all for being the absolute best.

SOMEHOW THERE WAS MORE HERE by D. Douglas Goodman

[dannygoodmanwriting]

About the only promise one can find anywhere in this country today is the way some...people are carrying on, making a fuss. I include both their renewed interest in politics (as protest and as community action, rather than as theory) and the way they dance, dress, wear their hair, riot, make love.

“What's Happening in America?” by Susan Sontag

[dannygoodmanwriting]

"We Lived Happily During the War," by Ilya Kaminsky

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we protested but not enough, we opposed them but not enough. I was in my bed, around my bed America was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house. I took a chair outside and watched the sun. In the sixth month of a disastrous reign in the house of money in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money, our great country of money, we (forgive us) lived happily during the war. 

[dannygoodmanwriting]

Get up every day and do the thing. Don’t rush. Every word you write is necessary, regardless of which ones end up in print.

@nicholasmainieri, author of The Infinite, on #writing

[dannygoodmanwriting]

On Writing Darkness and Violence in the Lives of Teenagers

Two of our best writers, @robinwasserman and @nicholasmainieri, in conversation at @lithub. A must-read. 

[dannygoodmanwriting]

Those who knew what was going on here must make way for those who know little. And less than little. And finally as little as nothing. In the grass that has overgrown causes and effects, someone must be stretched out blade of grass in his mouth gazing at the clouds.

“The End and the Beginning” by Wisława Szymborska

[dannygoodmanwriting]

I asked people to see the worst in our country so that we could preserve the best of it. American exceptionalism was never real. It was a myth of hubris, and a deep denial of the past. We are a country founded on slave labour and stolen land. We are a country where white mobs lynched blacks for entertainment, and white parents told their children to gather around and cheer. Children are taught in school that these injustices are exceptions, but they are the rule. The willful blindness to injustice is the real American exceptionalism. We deny our worst instincts. And now we may have elected them.

Sarah Kendzior

[dannygoodmanwriting]

You don't have to look that far to find horror. And your job as a writer, no matter how uncomfortable, is to occasionally but responsibly shine a lamp lit with blood into those dark corner of human existence.

Benjamin Percy, “There Will Be Blood,” from Thrill Me @graywolfpress

[dannygoodmanwriting]

Baseball can do that, I guess.  It can remind you of everything that once mattered to you, everything that matters still.  It can brush the great promise of tomorrow against the agreeable sting of the past, and the sorrows of today.

Daniel Paisner, “What Is It About Baseball? W.P. Kinsella, José Fernández, and the Dust of the 2016 Season” (via @millionsmillions)

[dannygoodmanwriting]

Major successes occur mostly in obscurity (appreciated, if you’re lucky, by your family, and the writer-friends you’ve made, who understand). But, in general, 'success' only means that you get up every day and do an unseen thing. It takes a long time to finish a novel and a long time to find a home for it. Someone might glance at those solitary years of work and wonder why in the hell you’d want to do that. I can take pride in that, and hope that I’ve made a thing that will be useful to someone somewhere.

Nicholas Mainieri (@nicholasmainieri), author of the forthcoming novel The Infinite, in conversation with Andrew Ervin at @thetinhouse

[dannygoodmanwriting]

...there are moments in a writing life where you realize just how futile the act really is. In trying to articulate something so important, you come to understand how little words can actually do in the face of such monumental loss.

Stacey May Fowles, "Baseball Life Advice: Grief"