Contributor Confab: Bob Laine

"I want to haunt the hell out of some people!"

Is Bob Laine a wonderful writer because he’s a wonderful actor? Or is it the other way around? The question is disingenuous, of course, because both art forms traffic in language and empathy, projecting emotional imagination into the world in the form of words filtered through craft. And so reading his slips slips poem ”Gone” is one kind of pleasure, while hearing him read it out loud is an overlapping but related pleasure - as is seeing one of his many stage performances, which New Yorkers can do pretty much any weekend because the guy never stops.

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ss: Is there any special background/context to your slips slips contribution that you'd like to share?

BL: “Gone” is from my newest play called Inventions, a monologue show about my family, and the two weeks I have spent for the last two decades visiting them every year in Ft Walton Beach, Florida. It is a play about how you can love your family but at the same time need to escape them.

ss: Name three writers or artists, and tell us why you named them?

BL: John Irving, Tom Robbins, Spalding Gray... John taught me how to start and end a story, Tom taught me how to make a sentence come alive, Spaulding taught me how all writing is performance!

ss: Ghost, vampire, werewolf, or zombie? Why?

BL: Ghost, as they seem the most likely to be real, and it gives me something forward to look to after I die, I want to haunt the hell out of some people!

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Here’s Bob reading “Gone” at the slips slips Issue 1 launch event (introduced by Eliza Stamps):

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Learn more about Bob’s work at MadKingBob

Learn more about slips slips (including how to get a copy) at slipsslips.net

Submissions for slips slips #2: Dialogues are open until August 31. You should totally send us something!