The Writing of Jack Remick

Man Alone: The Dark Book

Man Alone is set in and around a complex Seattle where Rat City meets the Billionaires’ Club. Zene, a man alone, lives in a chaotic, sexually disruptive and violence-wrecked world. His life ruined after a chain of disappointments and falls-the fruits of his violent nature, Zene runs into Karizma, a love-creature from his past, and he’s smitten again, knowing all the while that for him, there’s no future in love. Not your basic romance, for sure.

No Century for Apologies

Pieces

The creative impulse comes. How do you know that it has to be a poem? What if it’s a piece of sculpture? or a novel? You are the instrument of the language. How do you know that the meaning of the impulse can’t be accomplished by going in and doing the dishes?

PIECES is not a collection of poems, not a collection of stories, but PIECES of the craft in fiction, poetry, essay, and workshop.

What Do I Know

The essays in this book center around the questions of love, wisdom, and knowledge through time. What is love in the twenty-first century? Is there a wisdom to marriage? Are our bodies “naturally wise?” What is the nature of orgasm? The meaning of sex? The author uses examples from ancient authors such as Pascal, Marcus Aurelius, and Descartes to clarify the issue of the decay of wisdom and the relation of nature to science, while at the same time drawing on present-time social and cultural mores to ask the enigmatic question-Is there such a thing as “stupid wisdom?” This is not a how-to book on becoming wise, but an interrogation of human wisdom in the Anthropocene. Will the “speaking word-ape” destroy itself as well as the environment it lives in?

Maxine

Maxine and Berle are on the run with Charlie’s half a million dollars and a shrunken head in a wooden box. Charlie wants Maxine back, he wants his money back, and he wants Berle dead.

Gabriela and the Widow

The Widow (La Viuda) is ninety-two years old. She lives in a house filled with photos and coins, jewels and a sable coat. Aware that her memory is failing but burning with desire to record the story of her life on paper, she hires Gabriela, a ninteen-year-old Mixteca from Mexico. Gabriela is one of the few survivors of a massacre and treacherous journey to El Norte. Gabriela and the Widow is a story of chaos, revenge, and change: death and love, love and sex, and sex and death. Gabriela seeks revenge for the destruction of her village. The Widow craves balance for the betrayals in her life. In the end, the Widow gives Gabriela the secret of immortality.

Valley Boy

Ricky Edwards lives, works, and plays in Centerville, a small California town in the middle of the Valley. Ricky has a gift for music but he’d rather fight, drink beer, chase girls, and debeak turkeys. He debeaks turkeys because he wants a Lifters Car Club jacket with red lettering on the back. He fights because his long-time pal, Linard Polk, teaches him about violence, fast cars, and guns – which drives Teresa, Ricky’s hyper-religious mother, nuts. She wants Ricky to escape the legacy of his daddy, an Okie skirt chaser who abandoned the family for a honky-tonk preacher’s daughter gone bad. If Ricky can just get out of Centerville, maybe he can make his mark.

Valley Boy is Book Two of Remick’s California Quartet Series.

Blood

Ex-mercenary Hank Mitchell is doing five years hard time for stealing a tubful of women’s underwear. In prison, Mitch falls like a bear for his young cellmate. In the prison library Mitch discovers the novels of Genet and the Marquis de Sade and is inspired to write his own story – a saga of family deception, sexual obsession, and contract killing – to atone for all the blood he’s spilled. But now his family wants him out and back in the killing game, a game where the rules are about to change.

Satori

Jack Remick is a writer and teacher. As a young man, he worked as a tunnel rat, a bus driver, a house painter, a social worker, a retail clerk, and waited tables at the UC Berkeley Men’s Faculty Club where he rubbed shoulders with Nobel Laureates, scoundrels of all stripes, and international students from a dozen countries who taught him about cultural relativism. Remick learned to write poetry from J.S. Moodey in Centerville, California, and from Thom Gunn at UC Berkeley. When he was young and idealistic, he dropped out of Cal-Berkeley and spent time chasing rainbows in South America. When that didn’t work out, he repatriated, got degrees from Berkeley, San Francisco State University and UC Davis where he specialized in romance linguistics and French literature. At Davis, while studying with Jarvis Bastian, a psychologist, Remick discovered Claude Lévi-Strauss, psycholinguistics, and C.S. Peirce—discoveries that changed his life, his writing, and his mind. Remick reads and writes French and Spanish. For a short time, he was the only Spanish speaking social worker in Fresno County. Now that he is older and wiser, he has given up travel in favor of the sedentary life of a writing guru to hordes of writers in Seattle. He enjoys that very much and is very proud of the writers who practice the discipline. Remick taught fiction and screenwriting in University of Washington Certificate programs. He served for several years on the editorial board of Pig Iron magazine as fantasy editor, contributing editor and assistant editor.

Jack Remick

As a writer approaches the visionary techniques of Late Style, art changes from exercises in the craft of massaging the Ego to the transformative language of the unconscious, the archetypes, the structural reality of myth.

Art is salvation ever more so in the Late Style which is that time when the artist, in silence, frees the mind from oppressive and expected cultural-historical restraints of form and content to unleash a newness that both confounds and instructs. Without art, we are members of a tribe of efficient killers. I am not a member of that tribe.

Free Master Class with Jack Remick

Do you have a passion for writing, but find yourself struggling to begin, persist, or complete your creative works? If you’re nodding your head, then you’re in for a treat! Unleash your inner writer and join us for an extraordinary journey into the world of storytelling! Acclaimed author Jack Remick invites you to a FREE Master Class, hosted every Tuesday from 1-3 PM Pacific Time via Zoom.

In this exclusive Master Class, Jack Remick will share his wealth of knowledge and experience, taking you on a deep dive into the art of writing. Here’s what you can expect:

 

Introduction to the Craft: Jack will kick things off with valuable insights on how to start writing, ignite your creative spark, and overcome the infamous writer’s block.

Keeping the Momentum: Learn the secrets of keeping your writing momentum going, ensuring you stay inspired and motivated to craft your best work.

Finishing What You Start: Jack will unveil his strategies for completing a body of work – the ultimate goal of any writer. Discover the techniques that will help you bring your creative projects to a satisfying conclusion.

Live Workshop Session: What makes this Master Class truly unique is the opportunity for you to have your work personally reviewed and workshopped by Jack Remick. Submit a piece of your writing ahead of time, and during each session, he will select one piece for live discussion and improvement. It’s like having a bestselling author as your mentor!

Don’t miss out on this chance to receive personalized guidance from a seasoned writer. This Master Class promises to be an invaluable experience that will help you unlock your writing potential.

Date: Every Tuesday, Starting January 2, 2024

Time: 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM (Pacific Time)

Location: Zoom (Details will be provided upon registration)

Ready to embark on this incredible writing journey? Sign up now and be part of the Master Class that could change your writing life forever!

The Latest from Jack Remick

Interview with Voyage Utah

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jack Remick.

Hi Jack, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.

My writing life began when I studied poetry at UC Berkeley with Thom Gunn. He taught me the essence of originality when he asked me why I was copying the style and substance of other poets–dead, of course. Jack, he said, when you inhabit another man’s universe it will always be smaller than the one you create for yourself.

After that wisdom, there was no going back to imitation. After years of work, experimentation, and exploration of the writing world–which involved three trips to South America and their exposure to both Indigenous and Colonial lifestyles–I returned home carrying a load of understanding and desire that had not driven me before. Life in South America gave me three novels: No Century for Apologies, which won Honorable Mention for the Hoffer Grand Prize; Gabriela and The Widow which was a finalist for the Book of the Year Award; as well as a Finalist for the Montaigne Medal and One Year in the Time of Violence, a novel that follows a Gringo living in the time of the Colombian Violencia with all its horror and political chaos.

I have been a college instructor, a grammar school teacher, a social worker, a community activist, a tunnel stiff, and a bus driver. My writing world expanded with each life experience until I was able to write a ground-breaking novel titled Citadel. Enraptured with fiction, I had ignored poetry until events unfolded which led me to write Josie Delgado, a Poem of the Central Valley and Satori. With each publication, I understood more of Thom Gunn’s wisdom. I have collaborated with many writers to produce work that has found a place in the Writer’s How-to Pantheon, but the major contribution is The Weekend Novelist Writes a Mystery, with Robert J. Ray.

On the heels of writing success, I entered the world of radio and have worked for several years with Marsha Casper Cook and her Michigan Avenue Media. There is a saying in the world of screenwriting–Be kind to the people you meet on your way up because you will see them again on your way down. That bit of wisdom has been my guide as I offer, free of charge, my weekly Masterclass in Interactive Rewriting. I met many writers on my way to my limited success and I am more than happy to share what I know with younger (sometimes older) writers anxious to see their work in print. Several of my students have published work that I do not hesitate to recommend in my reviews of said work. I continue to teach and to write.

My latest novel, Man Alone (2023) asks the question–what is happening to men in our culture? Why are so many men lost and alone? Why are so many young men rejecting education m favor of violence and the marginalized life? At this time, I am writing the follow-up novel to Man Alone–The Last of the Best–while at the same time reading the work of other writers and producing blurbs, reviews, and critiques. I think that it is my job and my duty to encourage, protect, and laud writers as they venture into the dangerous world of words.

A friend once told me that it is easier to rewrite history than to rewrite a novel. I believe that adage, but it doesn’t deter me from pursuing the ineffable and beautiful beyond reality that lies on the other side of experience.

 

This is an excerpt. You can read the Full Interview with Voyage Utah by Clicking Here.

 

Press Release: Man Alone

SIDEKICK PRESS RELEASES MAN ALONE BY JACK REMICK

Man Alone is set in and around a complex Seattle where Rat City meets the Billionaires’ Club. Zene, a man alone, lives in a chaotic, sexually disruptive and violence-wrecked world. His life ruined after a chain of disappointments and falls—the fruits of his violent nature—Zene runs into Karizma, a love-creature from his past, and he’s smitten again, knowing all the while that for him, there’s no future in love. Not your basic romance, for sure.

Man Alone is now available on Audible!

Download today to escape into Jack Remick’s “new genre, pulp literature!”

An Excerpt Read by the Author

 

Early reviews praise Remick’s new title:

From its opening scene on a bar stool, to Zene’s denouement, walking into the tunnel of darkness, the novel beguiles the reader with images that arrest, unmask, and reflect Everyman’s fated existential dialogue with self.

Man Alone’s stripped-down cadence—peeling away the veneer of words—achieves an apotheosis of carnal
sensuality where two bodies combine into one…this author’s luminous reveal.

—Dennis Must, author of MacLeish Sq. et al

Jack Remick has invented a new genre—Pulp Literature. In Man Alone, Remick delivers lines with the deadpan of a
pulp detective on the crime-trail…Remick’s characters engaged in the base pursuit of their own ends, burn up in
the fire of their own kindling…Remick builds on a theory of masks and unmasking, and, in the stunningly poetic
images that run in Zene’s observations, you see a writer as observer whose characters have depth as well as a fatal
blind spot. In Man Alone Remick has come into some kind of new literary superpower.

—Christine Runyon

Man Alone is a story that must be experienced…the story is wonderfully original, with characters who are exquisite
in their flaws…Remick’s talent with words is unquestionable, and his ability to create such original tales that draw
you in and force you to contemplate the realities of the darker side of human nature is, in my opinion, unmatched.

—Theresa Cogdill

 

For more information, to inquire about a review copy, or schedule an interview, please contact Lisa Dailey at
360.224.5535 or lisa@sidekickpress.com.

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