Biography

George Logothetis

The first time my words were published was in the Gary Post-Tribune’s “Predict The Future” contest in 1983. The challenge was to envision what Northwest Indiana would be like in 25 years. Along with two childhood friends, I co-authored an entry that won second place. The article centered around a toxic landfill which had turned the entire region into a place of mutation where people all grew big toes out of their foreheads. The judges called it “delightfully inventive and frightfully provocative in its sly portrayal of the dangers of toxic waste.” My two friends and I were paid a grand total of $15. Each of us was issued a check for $5.00 from the newspaper. We spent the fifteen bucks on a Stroh’s 30 pack. My professional writing career had unofficially begun.

The second time I was published was a dozen years later. I had already started a career as an advertising writer, but I wanted to write other things, too. I kept noticing that when you bumped feet with someone under the table, it was always an awkward moment. So I wrote an absurdist story entitled “When Two Men Touched Feet.” On a lark, I sent it to a magazine called Speak, out of San Francisco. Sadly, like many small mags and zines and literary journals, Speak is not around anymore. Well, Speak ran the story, and had an illustration done along with it, and paid me $100. It was the first story I ever wrote. To get it published was quite an accomplishment. I cashed the check and went to Sparks steakhouse and ordered a hundred dollar bottle of wine and smoked a cigar at the bar. I was a writer. Yessiree.

Encouraged, I wrote more stories. A music producer friend told me about seeing Sting in a studio in midtown Manhattan, pounding on the men’s room door. I quickly wrote another ludicrous piece called “Sting Shits His Pants.” A magazine called Uno Mas out of Baltimore published it, and also did illustrations for the piece. More stories followed. More publishing happened. I got into some decent pubs, including The Baffler, founded by the brilliant Thomas Frank who now writes the Easy Chair column for Harper’s as well as other works well worth reading. I briefly considered graduate school, but decided against it. It would be cheaper to read the greats, the writers I admired, and study them. So I read Twain. Vonnegut. H.G. Wells. J.G. Ballard. Graham Greene. Ambrose Bierce. Ray Bradbury. Harlan Ellison. Raymond Carver. H.P. Lovecraft. Don Delillo. Will Self. Michael Chabon. David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Donald Barthelme, Saul Bellow, and many, many others. And T.C. Boyle, who became a special favorite.

I found Boyle’s writing incredible: full of beautiful lyric phrasing, magnificent description and punchy dialogue, and highly original, sardonic hyperbolic story premises and characters. I drew a thin comparison between his extreme satires and the far-fetched premises of my own nascent works. I learned that he taught at U.S.C., so I sent him a story. The story was a long rambling spoof about Mayor McCheese and how he’d been ousted from McDonaldland by the tyrannical Ronald McDonald. I thought setting a story in McDonaldland was a highly original idea. Mr. Boyle thought otherwise. In his response, which I still have framed above my desk, he stated:

“Your line to line writing is accomplished. But I wonder about the significance of your story. It seems fableistic at times, almost a children story.”

He was right. When I sent it to the New Yorker, their rejection letter simply said, “We admire your pluck.” For several more years I kept collecting rejection letters, hundreds of them, enough to fill an entire metal filing cabinet. I kept writing short stories, publishing a half dozen more, which are the ones you see here that comprise Empty Piñata and Other Tales of Woe. When I had about a dozen or so of them published, I submitted the collection to various agents, many of whom had kind remarks. But according to most of them, “short stories don’t sell.” A couple of agents I met recommended writing a novel. So off I went.

I wrote two novels in five years. One was about a guy’s guts crawling out of his body and taking off on their own. The other was about a car that ruined a man’s life. Both were overblown, straining metaphors for failed relationships. Each had flashes of glory but ultimately fell flat. While I don’t consider the novels themselves failures—they were grueling apprenticeships more than anything—they have not seen the light of day, due to many factors, some beyond my control, some well within it. Perhaps one day I will revisit them.

For the next several years, in addition to my advertising writing, I wrote a few screenplays, and developed an animation project that was pitched several times to various networks and independent producers. These projects were all well received, but ultimately remain in limbo. Writing for the screen is a whole other matter. I liken it to carpentry as opposed to the fine cabinetry of fiction. It’s a discipline equally as difficult to master in an entirely different way. Faulkner and Fitzgerald found that out the hard way. (The only way, I think, for a writer.) Perhaps one day I will revisit these projects as well.

While I admire the success of many commercial authors, ultimately, I think writing should have something to say. I’ve read plenty of nursery rhyme page-turners with four paragraph chapters and just to see how those forms work, and I am always struck by a hollow, empty feeling after finishing them. They’re mental chewing gum. Call me a snob or a priggish ex-English major, but I think writing must be imbued with some sort of meaning or grand or even minimal take away. I think some of my stories have that and some don’t. There’s nothing wrong with writing for the sheer sake of entertaining people, believe me. But I’d like to think that even the goofiest thing I’ve written is saying something about the human condition.

Satire is not a realm that exists in reality—rather, it takes reality and stretches it to far-fetched, outlandish extremes to make a conclusive and irrevocable point—and that is where I tended to live as a writer for many years. Satire is also a form that lends itself well to shorter lengths. Which is probably why I had some initial success with the initial set of stories that comprise Empty Piñata. A ludicrous premise is far easier to maintain for 3,000 words as opposed to 120,000 words.

That having been said, a few years ago I finally turned my attention to non-fiction. I have lived a pretty ridiculous life so far and met a lot of extreme characters and been in many outlandish situations. Situations more absurd than any my imagination could concoct. So, as I found myself telling friends and acquaintances some of the same stories and anecdotes over and over, and seeing their reactions, I decided to put some of them down. Specifically, in the form of a memoir. I’d had a few meetings with Augusten Burroughs’ agent, and had communicated with Dave Eggers back when he ran Might Magazine out of San Francisco and inspired by their successes, and noticing how the memoir category seems to be replacing the novel to some degree, in late 2008, I plunged into one.

It’s called Keep Shoveling: Tales of Blue Collar Madness, and involves my experiences working construction in the steel mills of Gary, Indiana, my hometown. I worked in U.S. Steel while attending college and the two worlds were bewildering extremes. I have just finished the second draft of Keep Shoveling and will be revising it over the next few months and hopefully be ready to offer it to the publishing world sometime soon. If and when it gets published, I can guarantee you won’t see me sniveling on Oprah, defending myself about misleading readers with outright lies and fabrications, because in my book everything actually happened. I’ve got the scars to prove it.

I should also mention another writing project: a blog that you probably found this site from called www.news-from-hell.com. Many years ago I noticed that the New York Times used more “literary” words in their headlines. So on a whim, I started cutting out words that I liked and throwing them into a box. Then I’d sift through them and make up my own headlines. It was a fun exercise and was a new way to construct messages that I would never have thought of normally. Basically, it was verbal collage. Whether witty, absurd, or philosophical, each of the reconstructed headlines in News From Hell unearths a much deeper meaning than the news reports they were taken from, reinterpreting the events of our times. It was a hell of a lot of fun to do and a nervous, poetic habit that I continue to conduct to this day.

Those are some broad strokes of the twenty or so years I have spent pursuing the writing game. I hope you enjoy the words I have assembled in these stories. I promise you there will be many more to come.