Robert James Russell

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be teaching an online workshop with Bending Genres September 21-23, 2018!

My course, titled The Rapture of Being Alive: Plaiting Our Personal Narratives Into Flash Fiction, will look at how we can craft better flash fiction through mining—and weaving in—personal experiences, memories, and physical senses.

Bending Genres, brainchild of the supremely talented writer, editor, and teacher Robert Vaughan, offers a host of online and in-person workshops and retreats, aimed at beginners and experienced writers alike, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to be participating.

For more information on my workshop (including pricing and registration), and information on all the IWH workshops, click here.

 

Part 4 of my seven-part, bi-weekly essay series RHINESTONE COWBOYS is up at The Coil Mag.

Here, I muse about the immigrant experience in Western films and how sometimes it takes an outsider lens to see ourselves clearly (including artwork of Ben Mendelsohn in Slow West):

It is through this perspective that we gain the best understanding of the genre’s importance — it doesn’t really matter what a cowboy is, but what the land and the open space and the attitudes and the ability to cobble a life together, a new, greater life, perhaps, say about becoming an American.

You can read the previous chapters here:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Coming in Part 5: Wes Studi in Hostiles, and Native American representation in Western films.

My CNF piece “High Low”—about being fourteen and church camps and awkward first kisses and how Nada Surf’s song “Popular” has affected me all these years—is up at Atticus Review:

When I have my first kiss a year later, as a sophomore—a late bloomer, my friends joke—we’ll be at her house in the basement playing point-and-click games on her computer, alternating between Sam & Max and Myst. She’s more popular than I am, but still not popular. I have no idea why she’s interested in me.

This is a super personal essay that took so much out of me to write and I’m grateful to Jen Maidenberg for publishing it.

I’m grateful: My creative nonfiction/memoir piece “Corpus”—about violins and what I want to do with my body when I die—was nominated for the Best of the Net by Split Lip Magazine!

You can read “Corpus” here. I’m grateful to Kaitlyn Andrews-Rice and Ray Shea for accepting the piece and for this major kindness. Delighted, too, to be in such stellar company here. Make sure to check out all these pieces, y’all.

Part 3 of my seven-part, bi-weekly essay series RHINESTONE COWBOYS is up at The Coil Mag.

Here, I talk about the troubling tendency to erase women’s stories from our collective consciousness and the history of the American West (as well as discuss Sharon Stone and The Quick and the Dead):

Women’s roles in Westerns settled, by the 1950s, into those of purity and beauty, defenselessness, hopelessly dependent on the hero — the cowboy — coming to save them. Any notion of identity and personality had been scrubbed clean. They were, like the mesas along the horizon near-blotting out the low-desert sun, the city of gold always over the next hill, the next hill, the next hill, there only to push the story forward.

You can read Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.

Coming in Part 4: Ben Mendelsohn in Slow West, and the Western as immigrant experience.

Part 1 of my seven-part, bi-weekly essay series RHINESTONE COWBOYS is up at The Coil Mag (run by the fabulous Alternating Current Press).

The series, part-memoir and part-historical essay and featuring original watercolor portraits of Western cinema figures, aims to dismantle the notions of what a Western is and dissect one of the most important times in American history as seen primarily through film and popular culture in order to fully understand the Western genre’s impact and weight.

In Part 1, I talk about Quigley Down Under, being fascinated with the vast Western landscape, and the complex legacy of the Cowboy and the Western genre:

I still remember seeing Quigley Down Under for the first time, the confusion that set in after: Can a Western be set in different countries? Is this genre, and the mythos surrounding it, uniquely American? Or does the sour machismo, the shoot-outs, the toxic male bravado transcend geographical boundaries?

A huge thanks to Leah for giving this series a home. You can read Part 1 here.

Coming in Part 2: Jeff Goldblum in Silverado, and rectifying how Western movies have, erroneously, “defined” American history since the birth of film.

 

Brilliant author Steph Post was kind enough to include me in her BOOK BITES series. I talk about my Western novella MESILLA, research and influences, and more. Here’s a taste:

What was something interesting you learned while researching that didn’t make it into one of your books?

For Mesilla, it was a lot of stuff, to be honest: I love the history of the American West (while recognizing how problematic it has been to mythologize it in popular culture). And yet, I get swept up in all the little nooks and crannies that aren’t readily talked or written about. I had a scene I wanted to put in about feral camels in the Southwest United States—they were part of the very real United States Camel Corp, an ill-fated experiment to import camels to be used as pack animals in Texas and New Mexico territories. Once the Civil War hit, the Corp was disbanded and the camels either were sold or escaped. I loved the idea of my characters coming into contact with them, even in passing, this romantic notion that the camels have flourished out here in the wilds, no longer bothered by humans.

Grateful that my creative nonfiction piece “In a Chapel Built of Trees”—about an old growth pine forest and the dissolution of a young relationship—has found a new home in the Summer 2018 issue of Hypertrophic Literary.

And that’s what drew us there: the old growth forest, preserved pines estimated to be between 350 and 375 years old. Massive-trunked trees — some with girths of more than four feet, even! — a forest of them, untouched by man. You and I were always drawn to places like that, the serenity of those ancient landscapes. We had wandered in, gasped aloud to one another, “What was the world even like when these trees were saplings?” and stood in awe of them. The trails were quiet and we were alone. At one point, I wedged myself into the cavity of a dead jack pine, tried to make you laugh.

A mighty thanks to Lynsey, Madeline, and Jeremy—I’m grateful to be included in such a stunning issue, inside and out.

I’m overjoyed to have “Youth at a Glance”—a triptych of graphic nonfiction/watercolor pieces about church puppets, roller skating, and Casio VCR watches—in the new issue of Sweet Literary.

A big thanks to Leslie Salas and the editors for taking these. Here’s a few quick screenshots—check out the full images at Sweet, as well as on my Art page.

I’m honored to have a micro-prose watercolor called “Blue Heron” in the new issue of Atlas and Alice. 

A big thanks to Ben Woodward for taking this piece.

Here’s a quick screenshot—check out the full watercolor at A+A, as well as on my Art page.