Author Spotlight: W.M. Butler

W.M. Butler

W.M. Butler is from Calgary, Canada. He was once a poet but now is a short story writer. He is currently being coerced  into writing a novel. He’s freaked out but happy that his work appears on H.A.L.’s website and ShanghaiSquared. Currently a short story of his is being adapted for the screen as a short film. W.M. Butler is currently working on his first collection of short stories due for publication later this year… or next.

W.M. Butler’s featured stories:

The Adventures Of Brute Noir: A Tall Tale (new)

I’m Steel, Baby

Five Questions for W.M. Butler

HAL: What time is it?

WMB: Um, like 4 AM.

HAL: What do you do when you’re not writing?

WMB: Feel guilty for not writing.

HAL: What made you want to pick up a pen?

WMB: Someone told me there would be chicks. I’ve always wanted a baby bird of my own but there was this… incident when I was three years old…
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Author Spotlight!: Ginger wRong Chen

Ginger wRong Chen

Ginger is a female writer; wRong is an incorrect writer; Chen is a Chinese writer. Ginger+wRong+Chen is a female incorrect Chinese writer, who manipulates the art of storytelling into short stories, film and TV scripts. Find her works in Party Like It’s 1984 or on our website.

Ginger’s featured story:

House on Fire

Five Questions For Ginger wRong Chen:

HAL: When you just can’t find that character, line, idea etc. What do you do to get your creative juices flowing?

GwC: Dip yourself into the blankness. Make it deep. Then jump out of it. Go do whatever rubbish you feel like, for instance, slicing some ginger, I mean the ginger ginger. Now let your subconsciousness do the rest of the work. Sooner or later you will have something, hopefully something good. The point is to have faith in the unknown part of your brain. You don’t need to know how it works. You just need to know it is working, and it works.

HAL: What is the first book you remember? Continue reading…

Apandalypse Now

“I love the smell of bamboo in the morning!”

Somehow along the way this whole panda thing just turned dark; dark and mentally disturbing. I feel the need to include a disclaimer before continuing further:

“In no way does H.A.L. condone the actions of the pandas or people appearing as pandas in the following stories. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. We here at H.A.L. love pandas in a wholesome way and have never had carnal knowledge… to our recollection with a panda, nor have we ever had the desire to know a member of the panda family in the biblical sense. No Pandas were harmed in the making of these short stories.”

J.C. – Hi Panda

Boy meets panda. Boy gets sexually aroused by panda… It’s a story as old as time.

Willow Neilson- Pandas Unleashed

We all know Pandas are lazy, sex hating layabouts… But what if pandas got their groove back?

Sarah Cottee- A Party

Debilitating alcoholism, plushies, illegitimate children. Not sure what else I can say here… (uncomfortable silence)

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Stay tuned for our upcoming “Author Spotlights” and H.A.L’s smashing new event at Garden Books!

Pandemic Panda Diplomacy

The Guys and Gals at H.A.L. and Unshod Quills got together for some hot and heavy  unprotected word play and managed to birth a piebald bastard lovechild. That’s right folks we somehow got it into our heads to choose Pandas, those darling ambassadors of peace and cuddliness from the PRC for our GT topic.  Little did we know that our writer out of residence, Dena Rash Guzman had an unhealthy Panda fixation and  rallied her troops to put out some top notch poetry, prose and pics of China’s other national symbol. So get ready for H.A.L. and UQ’s version of Pandemic Panda Diplomacy! All this week we will be featuring work by writers and artists from the USA and China, all in the name of promoting friendship, cooperation and hot panda lovin’ between two countries that are secretly afraid of each other but will never admit it…talk about your proverbial panda in the room…

Love,

H.A.L. & UQ

Dena Rash Guzman- Dear Mei,

An earthquake, a panda, a kidnapping, unrequited love. What else is there to say?

Rosemary Douglas Lombard & Heidi Tornieri – Bodacious Bear

Ancient Chinese myth meets a modern dilemma facing our furry friends. What’s a panda to do?

Wendy Ellis – Plastic Pandas

Plastic or made out of fur, pandas kick ass. Go with it!

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Check Back on June 3oth, for Part 2 of our Pandemic Panda Diplomacy Series!

The Golden Boy

by Katrina Hamlin

Ocean Park Themepark, Hong Kong, 1993.

“Scallywag,” said Mummy.

“Scallywag!” said the Hong Kong Granny in Cantonese as the peppermint ice cream slid down her face. But she smiled, licking cream from her hairy chops.

She reached out to touch his hair again, still smiling, green cream gathering in the wrinkles around her eyes. “Little gold-hair boy! Such good luck.”

He had nothing left to throw, and this was stranger danger just like they told him at school. Why did she want to touch his hair? Why was Mummy on her side? Why was she angry with him? Why was the woman not repelled by the well-aimed ice cream?

Overwhelmed by Mummy’s injustice and seeing that the world didn’t make sense, he turned and ran.

“You Scallywag, come back,” screamed Mummy.

He felt a knot tightening in his stomach and knew he couldn’t ever ever go back. He ran faster.

The Hong Kong Granny at another Granny in her tour group. “Did you see the gold-hair boy? I touched the gold for luck, and now he is running.”

Continue reading…

A Bruise

by W.M. Butler

I can hear them through the walls, making love. They do not sound like us. They sound different, the noises they make are alien. They are not like us. I will listen to them while laying in bed, on my back, resting my head on folded arms. Sometimes when I hear them start, I will stand up and pace back and forth along my room, along the wall where I believe the sounds come from. I will find the point which is loudest, that magnifies their cries. I will place my hands flat on the concrete wall, I will press my naked chest to the wall, I will rest my ear to the wall. The wall is cold, I can sense the thickness of the concrete by touch alone. I do not know how sound carries through such a dense material but it is so, in Chinese buildings, sound carries in strange ways. I know that these people are foreign but I do not know where in the building they live. It could be five floors above me and on the opposite end of the building. Their sex carries through the hallways and stairwells of the building like a haunted sound,  the dead calling out to the living. I shiver when I think this way, I whisper little prayers to keep the dead where they live, so they do not visit me. Continue reading…

SLAM Theatre Tonight at the Ke Center

HAL and SRT open the curtain tonight for Shanghai’s first ever SLAM Theatre performance. Four teams have been locked up inside the Ke Center since last night eight o’clock, and will emerge this evening before your eyes, live on stage with four completed original one-act plays. Read more about it here and here.

Address is 613-B Kaixuan Lu (near Yan’an Xi Lu),凯旋路613号,近延安西路, down the road from Yuyintang. Doors open at 7PM tonight (Sunday). Be there! Below pictures from last night and this morning, just to give you an idea.

Dena Launches Unshodquills.com into Your Veins

HAL is exceptionally proud to present to you the latest brainchild of our NA director, Ms Dena Rash Guzman: unshodquills.com
Introduction of this new project below, in editor-in-chief Dena’s own words. HAL takes hat and pants off, and applauds.

Unshod Quills: a Pandemic Journal of the Arts and Letters is the newest project from HAL’s trusty foreign correspondent, Dena. Unapologetic in her admission that she was inspired in large part by her experiences working with HAL, Dena presents an online arts and literature journal with every plan of bringing it from the computer screen to print within a year. Ambitious? Yes. Dena also plans to bring Unshod Quills to the people, with plans for live event featuring poets from UQ.

Each issue of Unshod Quills will feature authors writing on topics assigned by the editor. This issue’s topics include lipstick, beasts, When We Two Parted, sonnets, and transportation. The next reading period for Unshod Quills begins on June 15 – see the website for more details, or email the editor at dena@haliterature.com to be included on the mailing list.

Dena Rash Guzman: poet, visual artist and HAL Director of North America, and recently editor of UQ out of rural Portland, Oregon, formerly of Las Vegas, honorarily of Shanghai, China.  The Unshod Quills Writers Collective, including UQ’s first featured writer, Ms. Wendy Ellis of Pennylvania’s Amish Country and UQ’s first featured artist, Ms. Eva Steil of Las Vegas, Nevada. Plenty of writers from the Hai, including Renee Reynolds, Josh Stenberg (the great tiger tamer from 1984), Susie Gordon and Bjorn Wahlstrom.

The mission of Unshod Quills is to give voice to emerging writers from around the world, and to show the work of established writers and artists as well. Unshod Quills wants to shake up what is expected from the standard American lit journal by providing a forum for artists and writers of all disciplines. There is no one’s work UQ does not  want to see. The editor hopes for continued collaboration with HAL and the entire population of the planet. Unshod Quills hopes to be very contagious. Everyone will get it.

Six Word Stories

by Danielle LeClerc

Cock fight at the marriage market.

Continue reading…

Where the Dragon Comes From

by Elodie Gao

Do you know where the dragon comes from?  It starts from the carp.  There was one carp called Hu. It was fed by the people in a nearby village.  Hu tried its best to return their kindness.  Hu came up with hard scales to protect the village, strong claws to fight against enemies, big eyes to foresee potential dangers, and the most powerful ability — to change the environment of the village so that people there could always enjoy a comfortable life.  Finally, Hu changed from a carp to a dragon.

Continue reading…