Kevin Sampsell

It’s already February? I gotta catch y’all up on some stuff.

Besides doing the final edits on the great Chloe Caldwell book (out in April!) and doing some other Future Tense-related work (for instance, we’re now distributed by Small Press Distribution!), I’ve had some fun readings lately. I read at the If Not For Kidnap party on January 20th (congrats to INFK host Donald Dunbar for his recent Fence Poetry Prize) and then also at a fantastic Planned Parenthood event (which was reviewed the next day).

My next readings are gonna be pretty sweet too. I’ll be wandering around AWP in Chicago through the first weekend of March and reading at the Ear Eater reading series on March 3rd at 6pm at Beef & Brandy.   (also–I am on a panel about publishing fiction chapbooks at 9am the morning of the 2nd on the third floor of the Marquette Hilton.)

The following week, I’ll be back in Portland and reading at this cool event called SongStory. It’s on Wednesday, March 7th at the Someday Lounge. Other awesome readers include Lidia Yuknavitch and Gigi Little.

In other news, I had this essay about my experience with riot grrrl that was just published by Jewcy. This is an interesting piece that I actually wrote about two years ago after I found a letter from Bikini Kill’s iconic Kathleen Hanna that I had buried in a box of correspondence.

I shopped the piece around a little to some music magazines but it never quite fit anywhere. It was going to be published by a Portland paper, but they sat on it for over a year (waiting for a slow news week perhaps) that I finally sent it elsewhere. Thanks to Jason Diamond for taking it on.

Now, to tie this all together with the title of the post, I will tell you my thoughts on ketchup (or catsup, which is how you say it with a lisp):

The only thing positive that I ever learned from my first girlfriend was the trick of mixing ketchup and mayonnaise to make a yummy french fry sauce. We’d go to Burger King and chomp down two or three orders of fries at a time. Since then, I’ve done “the mix” everywhere I go, from burger joints to fancy places with twelve dollar burgers. Thankfully, one of my favorite Portland burger places, Little Big Burger, already has that delightful sauce ready-made for the asking. Thanks, LBB.

The only other time I like ketchup is with fish-n-chips. I’ll always remember filling up those tiny paper cup things at Skippers whenever our family went there on Friday nights during Lent. All-you-can-eat fried fish dipped in ketchup is a wonderful thing.

Okay, folks and friends. Thanks for reading! This post was written while listening to various videos by Eleanor Friedberger, like this beauty.