Bob Armstrong

Like many of you, I’ve been helped through the pandemic by regular walking. Hikes, walk-and-talks, neighbourhood strolls: anything that gets me out in the world and moving around has been helpful.

Another thing that’s helped me get through a time of fear, uncertainty and enforced idleness, which preceded the pandemic, has been comedy. Just before Christmas 2019 I was diagnosed with prostate cancer and put on the list for surgery. Almost immediately, I began working on stand-up material, most of it mining my cancer experience. Before pandemic shutdowns began, I did one set in January 2020 before my surgery and another in early March once I’d recovered enough from surgery to go out in the evening.

Since December, I’ve been doing monthly comedy sets on Facebook Live, gradually moving beyond the cancer material. (Sure, I’ve played the cancer card. Look at me. It’s the only card I’ve got.)

This wasn’t a huge departure for me. All of my plays were comedies or hybrid comedies (thriller comedy, philosophical comedy, comedy drama). And in my upcoming novel, Prodigies, one of the characters is a wise-cracking gang member whose dream is to tell jokes for a living in saloons and dance halls. Coming up with intentionally anachronistic Borscht Belt-style jokes for this character was one of the most enjoyable parts of writing Prodigies.

I’ve recently had a creative non-fiction piece, entitled The Cancer Joke, about my cancer and comedy experience accepted for publication. I’ll follow with more details on this one shortly.

I’ve also pulled together my feelings about the pandemic year in a magical realist comedic short story called The Going and the Gone, which will be published shortly in FreeFall Magazine, an Alberta-based literary magazine. I’ll post the link as soon as it’s up.

 

 

My novel, Prodigies, was to have been launched this month, but like every other plan over the last year, that plan didn’t account for the arrival of the pandemic. A series of cascading delays swept through the publishing industry last year, as spring releases wee delayed until fall, fall until winter and so on.

Prodigies is now scheduled to hit the shelves this July. I’m pitching it to literary festivals now and hoping I’ll have the chance to promote it live, in person. If we’re all still in pandemic mode come autumn, maybe you’ll be able to catch me online.

Delays also struck a few of my short stories that were accepted for publication last year. I now have a story entitled Frank 2.0 appearing in an anthology of western Canadian SF, fantasy and horror. Watch for the anthology, entitled Alternate Plains, coming out this fall from Great Plains Publications. My creative non-fiction piece on cycling and stoicism, Pilgrim on a Freedom Machine, will come out this year in the anthology Write to Move.

Before those books are available, the winter 2021 issue of the Calgary literary magazine FreeFall will include my pandemic-inspired bit of magical realism, The Going and the Gone.

I’m slowly working on a sequel to Prodigies in hopes of having it available to offer to my publisher by summer.

Other than that, much of my creative writing energy in the last year has been directed to stand up comedy. I started performing at open mike events not long before the pandemic and have recently begun doing monthly stand-up on Facebook Live. Look me up at Club Zuckerberg and you might catch my latest act.

Just tip your server and drive home carefully.

Recently published in Red Earth Review, Oklahoma City University:

(Follow the link. It’s the first short story in the summer 2020 issue)

Sometimes you’re hot. Sometimes you’re not.

Since signing my contract with Five Star Publishing for my novel Prodigies (see previous entry), the thermostat on my writing career has been turned up a notch.

On one day in February, two of my stories were accepted for publication in anthologies planned for this year. Pilgrim on a Freedom Machine, a memoir of a rambling, long-distance cycle trip through France and Spain, and the lessons I’ve drawn from it, will be published this spring or summer in Write to Move, an anthology of fiction, poetry and non-fiction dealing with movement, freedom, ability and disability and physical activity.

My story Frank 2.0, my take on an alternative-universes story, will be included in Alternate Plains: Stories of Prairie Speculative Fiction, which is planned for publication in the fall.

A few weeks later, I received word that Red Earth Review, the literary journal associated with the MFA program at Oklahoma City University, had accepted my short story Whattaya Gonna Do? Red Earth Review published my short story Testing two years ago. Now that I have evidence that Oklahomans get me, I’ll have to take a road trip straight south.

While buoyed by this positive news, I was working with my Five Star editor on revisions to Prodigies, which now is slated for publication in January 2021. No doubt, I’ll be updating the world on that in the months to come.

The life of a writer is a life of rejection. As a writer of novels, short fiction and plays, I’ve spent years being turned down by publishers, agents, literary magazines, theatre companies, granting councils: you name it.

You need a thick skin, but really no skin is thick enough to keep out the doubt and the suspicion that, maybe, these people saying ‘No’ all the time are onto something.

A few years ago, when I was in a down phase, I read an interview with the actor Chris Pratt, who was reminiscing about the years before his breakout role in Parks and Recreation, when he couldn’t get an acting job to save his life. One phrase stuck out in that story: “It’ll break before you do.”

It broke for me this fall.

I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve just signed a contract with Five Star Publishing, a Maine-based publisher specializing in fiction and non-fiction about the frontier, for my novel Prodigies.

Prodigies is a crossover novel, with elements of the superhero story contained within an otherwise realistic western, set in Deadwood in the 1870s (as well as in New York’s famed Five Points and various locales in the south and midwest). It’s the story of three young people with uncanny gifts who become embroiled in a megalomaniacal Robber Baron’s dreams of national domination. It’s a story of fast guns, fast talkers, entertainers, inventors, storytellers, dreamers and those haunted by nightmares.

I began the research for Prodigies even before I knew I wanted to write a western novel (the research began with my play about the missing years in the life of Manitoba’s founder and prophet Louis Riel). Then I spent a couple of years writing and polishing the novel before I was ready to start submitting. During that time, the encouragement and input of my writing group, The Cattywampuses, was one of those things that kept me going, kept me believing that Pratt’s prediction could come true.

And now, as I prepare for the pre-publication edits for Prodigies, I’m spinning through all the possibilities for a sequel. As I write this, I’ve just returned from South America, and I can’t help but reflect on the fact that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid tried hiding out on that continent. Could that be part of the setting of Prodigies II?

Red Earth Review, published by the MFA program at Oklahoma City University, has published my short story, Testing, in its summer 2018 edition.

Follow the link and go to page 145 (there’s a button for full screen display).

I now have 14 of these, four of which have been published, and am looking for a publisher for a collection. See you on the book tour.

My short story,Testing, has been selected for publication in the summer, 2018, edition of the journal Red Earth Review, published by the creative writing MFA program at Oklahoma City University. Here’s a preview:

Testing, by Bob Armstrong

I should have seen where things were going the night my boyfriend mumbled Julian’s name during sex. It wasn’t that kind of warning. Nick was no confused closet case, and believe me, I’d have figured that out quickly. In college I’d pretty much minored in dating guys who turned out to be gay.

“Fucking hell,” Nick said. “I’m sorry. It’s not that- I mean to say, I’m not-”

How upset could I be? I’d been thinking about Julian too.

“It’s just that my mind rather wandered.”

Guy knew how to make a girl feel special.

It was our last night in Mexico City and Nick and I had a private room at the hostel.  Julian, in an uncharacteristic attack of sensitivity, had gone out with my brother, Owen, in order to give Nick and me some time alone. I was thinking about Julian because I was wondering what temptations he might be presenting to Owen. Nick? Maybe he was afraid of losing Julian to my brother, or maybe Julian was just some kind of mental virus.

Two of my stories will be in print shortly.

I’ve just seen page proofs for the Kudzu House annual bound volume that contains my short story Succession. It’s an impressive-looking book, with two editions of the journal, which focuses on the intersection of literature and the environment, featuring short stories, poetry, essays and reviews.

Coming soon in Canada is That Dammed Beaver, from Exile Editions, an anthology of Canadian humour writing featuring me and somebody named Atwood, among others. My story, entitled Undelivered Letters Home From Junior Midshipman Archibald Ponsonby-Cholmondeley, Recovered Recently in the Search for Additional Remains of the Franklin Expedition, kicks off the anthology.

Poet, novelist and memoirist Carmelo Militano invited me to chat on the PI New Poetry Show on CKUW (95.9 FM in Winnipeg). So here I am, talking about writing and talking about myself for 30 minutes.

Themes: why do you write?, favourite genres, dealing with rejection, trying to earn a living as a writer, prize culture and its effect on literature, are writers inherently weird?

And since it’s a poetry show, I close with a poem I’ve written.

In Response to the 127^th Call This Week For Resistance Poems

By Bob Armstrong

 

Yeats should have asked a referee:

“Can centres hold, or not?”

That figure slouches still upon the burning sand.

Someone call a chiropractor, stat!

And you, ‘neath a synthetic sun,

Peer down upon your magic box,

Reciting maledictions on your foes.

Can you these tools create, repair, replace?

Could you wage war on want

Like Cana’s holy sommelier

With fixes quick (that’s bad enough),

But worse still, pre-, and worse still, suff-?

‘Gainst neos, phobes and ‘splainers

You’ll this exorcism lead

And start again at Zero Year

(“It’s been done? What’s that I hear?”)

 

My short story Succession was published recently in Kudzu House, a Florida-based literary magazine focusing on art and the environment. Click here to see it online.