Archive
My secret life? is an ocean.
Shipwrecks, storms. Unexplained lights.
Hideous depths. Lost treasure. People waving
from wild, imagined shores. This friendly
albatross gazing at my neck.
“Rime”
William Michaelian launched his first website, I’m Telling You All I Know, in 2001. In ten years it grew to contain more than 1,200 pages that featured stories, poems, notes, drawings, reviews, books, a forum, recipes, a daily journal, and his entire novel, A Listening Thing. Here you will find archival excerpts on a changing basis.
Titles Online
Songs and Letters (poetry and prose, 716 pages, multiple entries, 2005-2009)
Early Short Stories (22 stories, 1996-1997)
No Time to Cut My Hair (70 stories, 2002)
One Hand Clapping (daily journal, 730 entries, 2003-2005)
Collected Poems (73 poems, 1 essay, 2002-2008)
Poems, Slightly Used (first publications, numerous entries, 2008-2011)
A Listening Thing (novel, written 2001, posted 2003)
Notes from the Asylum
Notebook entry
I love the way sound carries early in the morning. At this very moment, there’s something strange and mechanical echoing in the distance, which I imagine to be a giant using a pogo stick, or a god banging on an anvil inside an aluminum warehouse three acres wide, as the new daylight streams in upon him through a window high in the eastern wall, smoke, soot, dust, ashes — yes, this is one heck of a sound. Those nearer its source have already gone mad, and the madness is rapidly spreading. Poor souls, who will survive, who will tell our story?
Other than that, things are fine here at the asylum. Before it was light, I was awakened by the following dream:
A bone-white demitasse delicately painted,
full to the brim with steaming, thick-foamed coffee;
and then, the gentle voice of an elderly woman,
urging me to wake up and remember.
Very interesting. And yet, I recall nothing about the table the cup was on, for instance, or if it was even on a table. All of my attention was focused on the cup. And what did the elderly woman want me to remember? The coffee, or something else?
What if she had just read my fortune, and I’ve forgotten that part of the dream? But if she had read my fortune, that would mean that I’d already had my coffee. Was the coffee hers, then? Was it meant for someone who had died before he or she could drink it? Was that someone still there with us in the room?
I don’t know. Maybe I’ll remember more of the dream, if there is more to remember, as the day goes by. Or I’ll imagine more. In all likelihood, I won’t know if I’m imagining or remembering — or dreaming. And I won’t really be worried about it, either. That’s one of the benefits of being wired this way. You take reality as it comes, then dream it’s something you’ve imagined.
New from Cosmopsis Books
A Listening Thing (Novel)
Tenth Anniversary Authorized Print Edition
With new Preface & Afterword by the Author,
Extensive new Interview & Materials
from the Original Unpublished
& Online Editions
ISBN: 978-0-9796599-3-5
US $18.00 at Cosmopsis Books
232 pages. 6x9. Paper. (2011)
The first printing of this special edition is limited to 150 hand-numbered copies.
A Listening Thing is printed on archival, acid-free, FSC certified recycled natural paper, with a beautiful matte cover.
“William, I am eleven chapters into your amazing book and coming up for air to tell you how happy I am to be reading it and to know the man who wrote it and be able to tell him so! I keep thinking ‘did I write this?’ because so much of it reads like my own thoughts, so many left unexpressed, unshared, so many years for lack of courage and sympathy. Oh, you have both — by the barrel! I’d thank you more, but your book beckons...and while I’d like this read to last forever, I can’t resist a few more chapters, or more...”
— Gabriella Mirollo, via Recently Banned Literature
“I can’t recommend this book enough. So unflinchingly honest and human. I can’t think of a book in recent years that connected with me so. It speaks to all of us.”
— Brent Allard, via Facebook
“A deep journey into the heart/mind of loneliness and hope told in the clearest voice of true vision.”
— Jasmine B. Brennan, via Facebook
“The sheer interiority of it, lodged in an external and plausible world is captivating.”
— Elisabeth, via Recently Banned Literature
“A profound vision of the inner life ... Some of the most resonant accounts of dreams in recent literature ... Some of the funniest, most acerbic rants about American society and values in recent literature ... essentially a meditation on loneliness, it is profoundly American ... compellingly human: we never doubt that narrator is telling us the truth. In a society awash every day in public lies, it’s refreshing to realize that honest expression is still possible.”
— Joseph Hutchison, via The Perpetual Bird