Mike Ingram

I can't respect anyone who tries to crop their own baldness out of their profile photo.

Sometimes when our current political moment feels stressful and/or hopeless I like to distract myself by imagining how each member of the current administration would be ironically dispatched by Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder version, obviously)

These somehow went missing on Day One of the conference, so I guess we have no Barrelhouse MFA cohort this year. Also I'm working on a conspiracy theory that some AWP staffer or board member took them because they didn't like us making light of their central financial product.

Giving my students a take-home final exam and the only question is Do you like me?

Just a heads up: in 2 weeks I'm going to open for some submissions for the @barrelhouse.bsky.social monthly newsletter. Short essays (under 1k words) about a pop cultural obsession. More details/short thread.

Not even "bad" books, per se, just books that I'm not feeling pulled into, for whatever reason, but might pick up again at some future date, my mind having been slightly rearranged by the intervening months or years

The older I get, the more pleasure I take in admitting to myself that I’m not into the book I’m reading and giving myself permission to stop.

Oh, your AI was trained on vast repositories of human writing? Ditto, my man.

My hack for detecting AI writing is to spend most of your life reading and teaching human writing, thus finely attuning your mind to its varied rhythms and cadences

Not really that interested in straight-up criticism or academic analysis, unless those things are paired with some personal-essay stuff. I AM very interested in why you're obsessed with something, why it speaks to you/weirds you out/gives you nightmares/lives in your head forever.

In terms of subject matter, we can define "pop culture" broadly. Weird, niche stuff is always appreciated, though we're open to mini-essays about well-known pop culture, it just needs to be an original, idiosyncratic piece. I definitely lean toward pieces that have a good bit of *you* in them.

Though we're also fine with a piece adapted from your recently-published, or about-to-be-published book, as long as it also works as a standalone essay of under 1K words.

The newsletter doesn't "live" anywhere permanently, except in subscribers' inboxes. So you may also be able to publish the piece, or a longer version of it, elsewhere (depending on the other place's rules, obviously, but it's fine with us). Though we want unpublished, first-run pieces.

Each newsletter features one piece of original writing (i.e. your essay) followed by a few blurbs about whatever's going on at Barrelhouse. We pay. And will link to your website, your book for sale, etc.

Just a heads up: in 2 weeks I'm going to open for some submissions for the @barrelhouse.bsky.social monthly newsletter. Short essays (under 1k words) about a pop cultural obsession. More details/short thread.

I love how the first warm day of spring makes every college campus turn into a college campus from a movie

I’m on my way back to philly so the people at the table won’t be me but I’m sure they would also enjoy talking to you

Still thinking about them

Someone left Dunkin Donuts munchkins by the sink in the AWP bookfair bathroom, and I’m kinda ashamed at how much deliberation it took for me to not eat one

Then go visit the @barrelhouse.bsky.social table (1185) and talk to nice people

Vacation Photos, San Francisco (2005, Kodak paper) In which I consider the ways people fall in and out of our lives

if you’re at AWP and need a break from small talk you could go sit in a quiet place and read this little essay about my dead friend

Looking forward to tonight’s AWP offsite event, which is me taking a train back to Philly and then lying on my couch for a while. I hear there may be snacks.

Oh wow. Jealous!

AWP offsite event idea: no readers, cozy fire, we all sit quietly with our books, occasionally a cat climbs onto your lap

Barrelhouse booth 1185

Nothing says "we have no bosses" like an 8 foot rainbow-laser-eye cat banner. Come see us at booth 1185 at the AWP bookfair today, writer nerds!

Gonna tell everyone at AWP that I’m Michael Chabon

fake barrelhouse university "MFA degrees" to use as prizes at the Barrelhouse AWP conference booth

At @barrelhouse.bsky.social University we care about education, and that's why we will be conferring these MFA degrees next week to lucky wheel-spinning degree-seeking participants at Booth 1185 at the AWP Bookfair. The children are our future, even the poets.

Look how cool we were (someone send this to the Criterion people for their “the 90s do the 70s“ feature

Like the prison scene in Goodfellas, but it's me using a razor blade to slice the banana I put on my morning yogurt

Vacation Photos, San Francisco (2005, Kodak paper) In which I consider the ways people fall in and out of our lives

My friend Kyle died several months ago. I'd been wanting to write something about him, but not sure if I should, since I didn't know the whole story. But then I found these old pics from a 2005 trip I took to see him in San Francisco, which seemed to offer a way in.